Gender, Law Schools

Law School Women Don't Need 'Lower Pressure' Environments

Stop telling women they thrive when the pressure is off.

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A couple of Stanford Law School professors have concluded that Stanford Law School has done a great job closing the gender gap between the performances of their male and female students, by putting all students in a “low pressure” grading environment.

In 2008, Stanford Law changed from a traditional A, B, C grading system to a Honors/Pass/Fail system. The professors called the new system “lower pressure,” and studied the gender gap in performance, before and after the change. They published the results in the Journal of Legal Studies. Insider Higher Education summarizes the results:

During the first part of that time period, from 2001-08, women earned grades that were 0.05 grade-point-average points lower than those for men. But in the data from 2008-12, when Stanford adopted a lower-pressure “honors and pass” grading system, the gender gap disappeared across all classes. That change didn’t just reflect “masked” grade differences under the new system, the authors determined through a kind of “shadow” grade analysis of pre-2008 data — women were really doing better. And in a mandatory class whose size was shrunk and instruction was made more “simulation-intensive,” involving more student interaction and participation, the gender gap was reversed.

Those are some interesting and positive results. But I seriously disagree with the characterization of Honors/Pass/Fail as “lower pressure,” and thus the implication that women in law school did better in so-called low pressure environments.

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