Even in Law School, Boys Differ from Girls

• Post by: Bryce J. Christensen
• September 15, 2009

Women increasingly comprise close to 50 percent or more of all students in law and medical schools, a trend over which the news media fawn as holding promise of gender equality in America. Yet a study by sociologists at Tulane University suggests that differences in the motivations, aspirations, and even academic performance of men and women in law school—not the alleged constraints of a sexist society—may frustrate the feminist dream. The researchers conducted two sets of interviews with 29 first-year law students attending a “top tier” law school in the South. In the first set of interviews, conducted the beginning of the first semester in the fall of 2002, the researchers discovered that relative to women, men appeared more motivated, citing more and different reasons for attending law school: having a greater interest in law; having a father who was a lawyer (only one woman did), and possessing “debating skills” (no women mentioned this reason). Men also aspired to more demanding career goals, being more apt to see themselves working in the private sector, including law firms. Moreover, all the men who were planning to be in firms anticipated becoming a partner within ten years; none of the women expressed this goal. Perhaps most revealing, men were more likely to envision their future jobs as fitting into their plans to marry and have a family. Women were more likely to see their careers as competing with their family aspirations, some even acknowledging the difficulty of having both or the inevitability of following a “mommy track” with a scaled-back career or part-time work. The follow-up interviews, conducted in the beginning of the second semester in early 2003, confirmed these basic sex differences but also revealed that the women had lowered their career expectations even more. According to the researchers, the students’ receipt of their first semester grades account for this change. Even as the coeds had ear