Monday, January 03, 2005
Bad Odds
Today was the first day of the January term here at Harvard Law School, where we take one class and one class only, very intensively, for a month. We cram a semester's worth of material into three weeks. It's great.
This morning as I looked around at the students in my class, "Creation of the Constitution," taught by a very distinguished visiting professor who I'm told sounds a lot like Tom Brokaw, I counted 72 students. And only 17 of them were women. That's 23.6%.
The male-female ratio here at HLS is about 50-50. There has been a lot of brouhaha about the fact that more men seem to make it on the Law Review than women. But this class is not like that, because it has no competition, requirements, or prerequisites except that you select the class and make it through the supposedly random class lottery.
Where are the girls? Is this a self-selection problem? Girls just didn't want to sign up for this class? Or guys put it higher up on their list of priorities for the lottery machine to process? The topic of the class is kind of fuzzy--it's all about the intellectual origins of our system of government. We'll be reading the Federalist Papers and Madison's record of the Constitutional Convention. It's not a precise class like tax or criminal law. But aren't women supposed to like the fuzzy classes, and men the precise classes?
The gender discrepancy has to be statistically significant. You wouldn't have a 24-76 split just randomly. So why? And more importantly, why should I care? After all, I'm already married!
This morning as I looked around at the students in my class, "Creation of the Constitution," taught by a very distinguished visiting professor who I'm told sounds a lot like Tom Brokaw, I counted 72 students. And only 17 of them were women. That's 23.6%.
The male-female ratio here at HLS is about 50-50. There has been a lot of brouhaha about the fact that more men seem to make it on the Law Review than women. But this class is not like that, because it has no competition, requirements, or prerequisites except that you select the class and make it through the supposedly random class lottery.
Where are the girls? Is this a self-selection problem? Girls just didn't want to sign up for this class? Or guys put it higher up on their list of priorities for the lottery machine to process? The topic of the class is kind of fuzzy--it's all about the intellectual origins of our system of government. We'll be reading the Federalist Papers and Madison's record of the Constitutional Convention. It's not a precise class like tax or criminal law. But aren't women supposed to like the fuzzy classes, and men the precise classes?
The gender discrepancy has to be statistically significant. You wouldn't have a 24-76 split just randomly. So why? And more importantly, why should I care? After all, I'm already married!
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