(Professor Jill C. Anderson and Professor Mathilde Cohen are equal co-authors of this article.) Law professors, consider: demographically speaking, who on your faculty tends to be widely published and cited, consume the most airtime at meetings and workshops, and hold tenured positions, perhaps with an endowed chair? According to Gráinne de Búrca, Rosalind Dixon, and Marcela Prieto Rudolphy’s insightful new article, Engendering the Legal Academy, the answer is likely to be—regardless of the country in which your law school is located—professors who identify as cismen. By contrast, they maintain that people who identify as women, especially women of color, are overrepresented among non-tenure track writing and clinical instructors and perform a disproportionate share of service roles while struggling to keep up with research “productivity.” In a field that proclaims a commitment to equality, yet whose 50 all-time most cited scholars include only two women (per U.S. data from 2021), a “gender gap” persists.
The article builds on work by Meera Deo and others who have examined race and gender inequality in U.S. legal academia. We focus here on what we see as two distinctive contributions, one that broadens the conversation and one that deepens it. First, it brings an international and comparative perspective into view. The authors draw on a mix of theoretical and empirical work, overlayed with their personal experiences, to show that women’s lower pay, lesser job security, higher teaching and service demands, and lack of scholarly recognition are features of law schools worldwide. Second, the article advances “non-consequentialist” justifications for reform. Instead of fixating solely on who these inequalities are bad for, it argues that, as a product of oppression and epistemic exclusion, the gender gap deserves attention because it is bad period. The argument travels well to other forms of social subordination.
Taking a step back, the authors’ international lens sharpens the question, “Why focus on the legal academy?” In some respects, inequality in law schools matches the common predicament of academics in all disciplines globally. UNESCO estimates, for instance, that “[j]ust 30% of the world’s researchers at universities are women.” Moreover, professorships are positions of considerable privilege to begin with, and in a number of countries teaching law is further advantaged relative to other academic departments in terms of compensation and course load. Various justifications for focusing on law schools emerge from the article.
First, the authors note that “the legal academy is . . . not equally privileged in all countries or contexts. In Sri Lanka, for example, Dinesha Samararatne notes that while women made up 77 percent of academics at the University of Colombo between 2009 and 2015, academic work was associated with significant teaching and administrative responsibility, and very modest pay.” In several countries, including the United Kingdom, law professors may earn less than comparable professionals and face increasing precarization. Additionally, the data marshalled by the authors show stubborn disparities even in countries that have relatively more developed welfare state programs, including support for caregivers in the form of paid parental leave, disability leave, and subsidized childcare, adult care, and healthcare. The gap persists notwithstanding the fact that women increasingly make up a majority of law students and new lawyers, as in 25 of 28 countries for which the authors have data. In sum, whether or not legal scholars are high-powered and well-paid professionals, barriers continue to prevent women and other marginalized people from reaching higher levels of professional success.
Second, legal institutions have played a central role in constituting gender inequality and are thus a key site of reform. How will the encoding of misogyny, transmisogyny, and misogynoir (among other gendered forms of bias) end if new legal thinkers are educated in institutions where cismen hold disproportionate epistemic authority over what the law says and should say? Ending gender oppression, the authors point out, requires more than just achieving gender diversity in legal academia, “as descriptive representation would not guarantee any particular outcome in terms of equality or justice.” They advocate a variety of initiatives, including de-prioritizing scholarship, which imposes asymmetric costs on female scholars (who “simply have less time” given their caregiving responsibilities) as well as on “those with significant health issues, or certain forms of disability.” They also put forward practical fixes such as: assigning academic service roles fairly and rewarding faculty for these services (might we also suggest offering teaching release and extra pay, particularly to professors of color burdened with “cultural taxation”?), providing or subsidizing childcare, and permitting hybrid attendance at academic events (we would add committee and faculty meetings), among others.
Here the authors’ non-consequentialist arguments get real traction. “[C]hanging social structures can be incredibly difficult, as well as costly,” especially in the short term. Costs may be economic, but they can also take less tangible forms, such as reactive attitudes. If closing the gender gap can only be justified by tallying up its harms and assessing costs under status quo norms, then reforms could conceivably appear to fall short of their price tag. Certain initiatives may even backfire, as they may exacerbate women’s and other marginalized faculty’s “time-poverty in ways that reinforce the original problem.” Having shown how inequality’s causes and reforms are thus interwoven, the authors reach a conclusion that is as sweeping as it is compelling: rather than “a set of discrete practices” what is needed is “the development of a feminist legal academy” along multiple dimensions, but most centrally based on “the re-evaluation of academic caregiving in relation to research” and teaching.
The Article makes a much-needed contribution by exposing the entangled, global nature of obstacles to academic flourishing for women and other minoritized people and the unequal burden of academic carework placed on their shoulders. It invites all of us to reimagine law schools as inclusive workplaces and learning environments, not just for professors, but also for the staff and students, who are increasingly feminized, but may lack crucial protections available to faculty members. The path is not likely to be easy, of course. As Mary Beard has written, “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.” As a classicist who has examined the silencing of women’s voices in Western literature—starting with Telemachus telling his mother Penelope to shut up because “speech is the business of men”—and has herself been the target of a torrent of abuse for her public speaking, Beard intimately knows what we are up against.
