Welcome! I am thrilled to begin 2012 as a Writer-In-Residence for Ms. JD, and I hope that the experiences and observations that will form the substance of this column will stimulate conversations around ideas of race, gender, and power in the legal profession. To wit:

I am a first-year law student. As is typical, all of my classes for the year have been assigned to me. Unfortunately, however, the eye of arbitrary assignment is blind to the realities of (mis)representation in the classroom. In the fall, 3 of my 4 professors were men; in addition, 3 of my 4 professors were white.[1] For another section, all of their 8 professors for the year will be men.

Analytically, these numbers makes sense. Only (relatively) recently have women been permitted to become law students, let alone law professors. See http://ms-jd.org/topic/features/first-women. Tenure makes academic turnover even slower than in other areas, so the professoriate (like the Supreme Court, I dare say) is a very small and very influential group that changes very slowly. Nevertheless, I wonder: in a class in which 50% of the students are women, why should there be so few women professors teaching the first-year students? This lopsided representation reinforces, in the abstract, the notion that only men are successful, high-profile scholars of the law; in the material, it reinforces the mysticism of men as the figures who command the classroom, whose favor is ambrosia, and who – perhaps most obviously – distribute the grades.

The Women’s Legal Alliance at my school has taken on many of these issues, including pressuring the administration to abandon arbitrary section assignment in favor of ensuring that each section has at least one woman professor during the year. The slippery slope here, of course, is in ensuring that each section has a professor who is representative of [x] attribute. This line of reasoning goes nowhere in a hurry, and is unproductive to germinating changes within the profession. Indeed, rather than analyzing the personal characteristics of the faculty and attempting to assign them to sections in an effort to maximize “visible diversity,” we should undertake efforts to move the profession in a direction that destabilizes the notion that only men can be professors. Professors are the people with whom students work on research and publication; they are also the people from whom students solicit advice and recommendations. Given the role professors can play in the development and career trajectory of any student, students should be exposed to women in academia in the first, most formative year.

So how do we do it? I suggest we first look beneath the surface. While there is a gender imbalance in the first-year professors, this ratio becomes more balanced in upper-year courses. (Perhaps your school is like this, too, where the number of women in clinical faculty positions tips the scale to a more balanced position.) Further, in departments such as the Office of Career Services, the staff is primarily women. Maybe one area to focus efforts is with these professors and counselors by asking them to organize events to discuss the pathways to success in the legal profession. Counter the lack of visibility in the classroom with visibility in other professional areas. Talk to your deans. Ask if they might consider ensuring that first-year students have more representative professors.

[I note that one could write substantially the same column about the lack of racial diversity (or most other diversities) in legal academia. The disparity between men and women as professors is particularly striking, though, given the compositions of entering classes in which nearly 50% of students are women.[2]]

[1] These are my normative assumptions about the correspondence between appearance and identification. I could be wrong.

[2]http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/legaled/statistics/charts/stats_6.authcheckdam.pdf.