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Gender Bias on the Cardozo Law Review?

Monday, April 27, 2009 12:03 PM - By Elie Mystal

Cardozo school of law logo.JPGWe've been bringing you a number of stories about law students melting down as the recession, finals, swine flu, and a spate of year-end elections takes its toll on America's next generation of lawyers.

The latest missive comes from a female Cardozo student who accuses the Cardozo law review board of gender bias. It turns out that this student lost an election to be Editor-in-Chief of the Cardozo law review.

But it also turns out that the executive board of the Cardozo law review has no female members.

The situation is so surprising that school officials have organized a meeting of all the law review 2Ls to discuss this matter. Unfortunately, the student who lost the Editor-in-Chief election will not be able to attend. Fortunately (for Above the Law readers), she decided to commit her thoughts to email:

I believe the journal does have a problem with gender bias in elections that we should address. It was striking that, for the second year in a row, the executive board does not have a single female member. It also stands out that, of all the editorial board positions with input into the article selection process for both the Law Review and de novo, not a single position is held by a woman.

The all-male composition of the most influential positions on the editorial board is at odds with the composition of the journal. It is also at odds with the objective performance of the female members of the staff. Of the thirty-seven Vol. 30 staffers, sixteen (43%) are women and twenty-one (57%) are men. The results of the blind Note-selection process mirror these statistics: of the sixteen Notes selected for publication in Vol. 31, seven (44%) were authored by female staffers and nine (56%) were authored by male staffers. Statistics are not available by which I could objectively assess the quality of staffers' C&Sing work. However, the Note publication rates suggest that, when blind judging is applied, female staffers perform as well as male staffers. This objective fact regarding the quality of female staffers' Notes is not reflected by the results of the past election. I believe there were well-qualified female candidates for the executive board and other editorial board positions who were overlooked.

Are law reviews still just an elaborate old boy network? You'd think not, you'd hope not, but this student provides other compelling stats after the jump.

Instead of simply filliping out at what appears to be a less than equitable situation, this particular Cardozo student did some research:

Looking first at the executive board, the numbers were as follows: for EIC there were two female candidates and five male candidates; for EE there were three female candidates and six male candidates; and for ME there were four female candidates and seven male candidates. The odds of randomly selecting an all-male executive board were less than 30%, i.e., it was unlikely. I do not know who ran for the executive board positions for Vol. 30, but if, hypothetically, the composition of the candidates was similar to this past election, the odds of the journal having an all-male executive board two years in a row would be less than 9%--not impossible, but very unlikely.

Expanding this analysis to include the submissions editors and de novo editor positions means considering the following: two women and two men ran for de novo editor; five women and six men ran for submissions editor. The odds that the entire executive board, both submissions editors, and the de novo editor would all be men, if selected randomly from the candidates who ran, was less than 7%. These odds are small enough that I do not believe the all-male result was a random occurrence.

Overall, thirty-one staffers ran for at least one position on the editorial board. Of this total, fourteen (45%) were women and seventeen (55%) were men. Eight of the female candidates (57% of those who ran) were elected to a position, while fourteen of the male candidates (82% of those who ran) were elected to a position. This means that male candidates were 44% more likely than female candidates to obtain a position, overall.

Someone will suggest that the lack of female representation on law review can be explained entirely by (totally unsubstantiated) claims that the female applicants were less qualified for positions than their male counterparts. But even that unenlightened argument would reflect back on the school itself. Is anyone suggesting that a respected law school is not preparing its female students just as well as it is preparing its male students?

In any event, it does appear the school is getting serious about the issue. Above the Law obtained this statement from the Cardozo administration:

After a recent election for members of the 2009-10 Cardozo Law Review Editorial Board, some editors were concerned that the members of the newly elected Executive Board were all males. In response, and after consultation with the Law Review's faculty adviser, the journal editors scheduled a meeting of all 2Ls on the law review for Wednesday, April 29, 2009, to consider the current election process and to discuss whether the process may and should be changed for future elections in light of diversity and equality issues. The email recently circulated to the newly elected journal was written by an editor who is unable to attend the meeting on the 29th and wished to share her views with her colleagues.

It should be a lively meetings. Surely there is a way that qualified female law students at Cardozo can have the same opportunities as the men who attend the school.

Read the full memo on gender bias below. It is long, but it a very interesting.

Earlier: More Evidence of Sexism in the Legal Community
Minority Women = Snowball In Hell

CARDOZO LAW REVIEW -- MEMO -- GENDER BIAS

All,

In response to [Redacted] memo, I believe the journal does have a problem with gender bias in elections that we should address. It was striking that, for the second year in a row, the executive board does not have a single female member. It also stands out that, of all the editorial board positions with input into the article selection process for both the Law Review and de novo, not a single position is held by a woman.

The all-male composition of the most influential positions on the editorial board is at odds with the composition of the journal. It is also at odds with the objective performance of the female members of the staff. Of the thirty-seven Vol. 30 staffers, sixteen (43%) are women and twenty-one (57%) are men. The results of the blind Note-selection process mirror these statistics: of the sixteen Notes selected for publication in Vol. 31, seven (44%) were authored by female staffers and nine (56%) were authored by male staffers. Statistics are not available by which I could objectively assess the quality of staffers' C&Sing work. However, the Note publication rates suggest that, when blind judging is applied, female staffers perform as well as male staffers. This objective fact regarding the quality of female staffers' Notes is not reflected by the results of the past election. I believe there were well-qualified female candidates for the executive board and other editorial board positions who were overlooked.

I recognize that fewer female candidates ran for many of the editorial board positions, especially the executive board positions. I hope next year we encourage female staffers to run for these positions in large numbers so that the sheer number of male candidates cannot serve as a justification for selecting an all-male board. However, the fact that male candidates outnumbered female candidates does not suffice to explain this past election's results.

Looking first at the executive board, the numbers were as follows: for EIC there were two female candidates and five male candidates; for EE there were three female candidates and six male candidates; and for ME there were four female candidates and seven male candidates. The odds of randomly selecting an all-male executive board were less than 30%, i.e., it was unlikely. I do not know who ran for the executive board positions for Vol. 30, but if, hypothetically, the composition of the candidates was similar to this past election, the odds of the journal having an all-male executive board two years in a row would be less than 9%--not impossible, but very unlikely.

Expanding this analysis to include the submissions editors and de novo editor positions means considering the following: two women and two men ran for de novo editor; five women and six men ran for submissions editor. The odds that the entire executive board, both submissions editors, and the de novo editor would all be men, if selected randomly from the candidates who ran, was less than 7%. These odds are small enough that I do not believe the all-male result was a random occurrence.

Overall, thirty-one staffers ran for at least one position on the editorial board. Of this total, fourteen (45%) were women and seventeen (55%) were men. Eight of the female candidates (57% of those who ran) were elected to a position, while fourteen of the male candidates (82% of those who ran) were elected to a position. This means that male candidates were 44% more likely than female candidates to obtain a position, overall.

Now, I do not have any reason to believe that the previous editorial board consciously discriminated against female candidates. Nor do I suggest that any of the men holding the above-mentioned positions on the Vol. 31 editorial board staff are unqualified--I respect and look forward to working with all of the Vol. 31 editorial staff. However, I do think these numbers show that we, as a journal, have a problem--while the selection for each individual position may be justifiable, the overall results just don't make sense and are undesirable. I suspect the problem is an unconscious bias that many of us still have regarding the roles of men and women. We still more readily see men in leadership positions, and fail to recognize the leadership abilities of women. I'm not just pointing fingers at others regarding this unconscious bias--I admit to it, myself. I think it is the natural result of the images, examples, and experiences to which we are exposed.

However, I think this unconscious bias is a problem we should consciously watch for and strive to correct. I can think of several reasons it is desirable to have women in some of the highest editorial positions on the journal. First, based on the objective performance statistics that we have (i.e. Note publication rates), there are female staffers who did not get positions that they deserved--this is unfair to those women. While this may seem like a small disadvantage, such early professional disadvantages faced by women build upon themselves over time. Holding an editorial board position presents advantages such as making one's resume strong and giving one chances to improve their editing skills and to interact with academics, practitioners, and judges. Women on the Law Review are being denied these advantages and opportunities.

Second, when qualified candidates are passed over because of their gender, the Law Review as an institution suffers. First, we look bad--briefly surveying the editorial board compositions of top-tier Law Reviews, you will find few that are composed only of men in the highest positions year after year. It's an embarrassing result because it makes the journal look more like a boys' social club than a scholarly endeavor. Second, it hurts morale on the Law Review--people may feel undervalued, hurt or angry, or that their qualifications are under attack. This undermines our ability to work together to produce high-quality publications and symposia. Third, it means the journal is not taking full advantage of what some of the female members have to offer in terms of leadership abilities, intellect, dedication, and creativity.

Third, I am concerned that an all-male panel of editors making all of the article publication decisions may not be sensitive to biases faced by female authors. Unlike the Note selection process, the article selection process is not blind. In choosing which articles to publish, the Law Review impacts the careers of academics and other legal professionals. I am concerned that the absence of women in the content-selection process will result in the same unconscious gender bias in article selection that we se reflected in the Law Review election results.

So that I could look into this issue, [Redacted] provided me with the submission data compiled since the Law Review began using ExpressO for its submission review process. The data I received covered all articles submitted to the journal through ExpressO from June 3, 2008 through April 6, 2009, i.e. 1,414 submissions. Of these, 489 submissions (35%) were received from female authors and 925 (65%) were received from male authors. Of these 1,414 submissions, 171 had been reviewed and either accepted or rejected by the Vol 30 or Vol 31 executive boards and submissions editors as of April 7, 2009. Of the 171 considered articles, 64 (37%) were written by female authors and 107 (63%) were written by male authors. I was pleased to find that female authors' articles have been reviewed in numbers proportionate to their submission rate.

However, the rates of acceptance are not so clearly proportionate to the rates of submission. Of the 64 female-authored articles that were considered, 7 (11%) were accepted for publication. Contrastingly, of the 107 male-authored articles that were considered, 19 (18%) were accepted for publication. Both of these acceptance rates are small, reflecting the selectivity of the journal. However, according to these numbers, when an article is reviewed, it is 62% more likely to be accepted for publication if it is from a male author than if it is from a female author. This gender disparity in acceptance rates for articles unfortunately mirrors the gender disparity in the election results.

This is not necessarily evidence of strong bias in favor of male authors, and admittedly the journal only accepts a very small fraction of the total submissions that it receives. However, there is enough of a discrepancy between the acceptance rates for male and female authors that my concern about a gender bias in article selection remains. I am encouraged by the executive board's opening up the submission review process to include input from journal members with interests in certain areas of the law--I think involving more people is one way to incorporate perspectives that are not reflected by the submissions and executive board membership. However, again, I think that these results raise a warning flag that we, as a journal, may be discriminating against women, and I think we should consciously address this possibility.

While I think its clear that the journal suffers from the unconscious bias against women that is still present in many areas of our society, what to do about it is a difficult question. I am hopeful that our awareness and discussion of this issue will lead to an overall greater understanding by the journal of biases still faced by women in the professional/academic realms, and that we will evaluate our actions with a sensitivity of this issue.

I think [Redacted] suggestion that we better explain the election process to next year's staffers, as well as conduct formal interviews, are important steps. Another idea I have discussed with [Redacted] is collecting feedback on the quality of next year's staffer assignments so that this data can be made use of in the election process. This objective data is both relevant to the election and can provide a standard against which to compare the results of the election.

I hope that we can also develop a mechanism to evaluate the results of the next election, in terms of gender diversity/equality, before announcing the results so that any problems we see can be address before the results are public. It is problematic to try to correct a problem with gender-biased results after announcing the winners because any changes made to the results could cause embarrassment or the feeling that people are having something taken away from them. While I would not go so far as to suggest quotas for next year's editorial board composition, I do think we should develop a plan to evaluate the results and correct any problems to the overall composition of the editorial board before announcing the results.

So that's my two cents on gender bias on the Law Review, and if you've made it this far I appreciate your consideration of my point of view! I'm sorry that I cannot attend the upcoming meeting, but I would be interested to hear any of your thoughts on this issue and I hope to work with all of you on addressing this issue.

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Posted in: Cardozo Law School, Gender, Law Reviews, Women's Issues

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