Kotkin on Gender and the Elite Law Reviews: An Empirical Study of Authorship

Update: Moving this to the top, because Kotkin's article is now up on ssrn.  On a quick read, one thing that really sticks out is the differences between the journals she analyzes--the journals at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Berkeley, Chicago, Penn, Northwestern, Michigan, Virginia, Cornell, Georgetown, Texas, and UCLA-- in terms of percentage of articles by women.  They run from 11.5% of the articles at the Virginia Law Review to 36.6% of the articles at the NYU Law Review.  (Kotkin was basically looking at articles published from 2005 to 2008.  There are relatively small Ns here--NYU published only 41 articles over that time.) 

There's also some other important data in there, beyond issues of gender--including the % of articles published by faculty members at each review's home school.  Couple of example here: 45% of the University of Chicago Law Review's articles are from Chicago faculty, while less than 3% of the Michigan Law Review's articles are by Michigan faculty.  And then there's some sobering data about the fields I work in.  Of the 601 articles under study, only 2 were on wills; 27 were on legal history.

Pretty interesting stuff.  I'm sure we'll be talking about this one for a while.

Update (number three):  Dan Markel has extensive and interesting discussion of this over at prawfs, where Jason Mazzone (who also commented here) has more extensive comments on ssrn downloads and gender.  Once I get back from Philly and have decent internet and--more importantly--figure out what to make of all this, I'll post some more on this.

Here's the original post:

Minna J. Kotkin of Brooklyn Law School has a new abstract up on ssrn (though apparently not the full paper--or am I just not able to use the new ssrn?), "Gender and the Elite Law Reviews: An Empirical Study of Authorship."  Her abstract reads:

Have you ever stood in the faculty library looking at the covers of elite law reviews and wondered where are the women? If you are a female academic, the answer is probably yes. This article tests my anecdotal impression that women authors are underrepresented in these journals. I analyze authorship by gender in thirteen (the top ten) reviews over a three year period, and also track the home school of the author, the year of starting teaching, and the gender of the editor-in-chief and executive articles editor. The article compares this statistical picture with the gender composition of the professoriat, using Association of American Law Schools statistics, and that of the law review schools' faculty. I conclude that there is a significant publication bias against women at most of the journals. The article considers several possible explanations for the disparity in order of palatability: the subject matter hypothesis; the institutional player hypothesis; the family/child hypothesis; the affirmative action hypothesis; and the Larry Summers hypothesis. None of these provides a satisfactory explanation for the disparity. The articles concludes with the suggestion that editorial boards examine their selection processes for unconscious bias, and consider adopting anonymous submissions.

As to her first question, I answer "yes"--and I'm not a "female academic." I've had that question about the authorship of book reviews in the field of legal history and also of books being review, too.   One of the things this may suggest is the need for journals that focus on gender and the law--though I know this addresses only a small part of the problem.  For, obviously, the majority of women write in areas other than gender.  I'm always glad to see scholarship that examines what's published in law reviews and takes seriously their role in the academic community.

I'm very much looking forward to the discussion that I expect Professor Kotkin's paper will generate.

Update: I'm behind the times; feminist law profs have already blogged about Kotkin's paper.

Alfred L. Brophy
 

Comments

[Jason Mazzone]

How about this statistic (I think I have counted right): Of the top 100 law authors at SSRN based on downloads, just five are women, and not a single woman is in the top 50.

[To see the list, at SSRN.com follow the link to Legal Scholarship Network then the link to Top Authors; log in is required to view the data.]

[Dan Markel]

I've posted on this paper over at http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2008/08/gender-authorsh.html

[Ann Bartow]

Jason, are you prepared to say that the SSRN Top 100 Law Authors are the most important legal scholars in the academy? And is it your impression that the articles published at the most elite law reviews get the most downloads?

[Jason Mazzone]

Ann,

The SSRN list is what it is: the authors and papers most frequently downloaded. As to the interesting issue of correlation with law review placement, I don't have an impression either way. But the usefulness of the SSRN list is we don't need to rely on impressions--somebody who is so inclined can figure it out.