Professor Thomas Gallanis asked me to post this response to Professor Bridget Crawford's post, Where are the Women? George Mason Law School & ACTEC Foundation Edition.
On March 28, Professor Bridget Crawford posted an entry on this blog, criticizing me, by name, for not having what Professor Crawford considered a sufficient percentage of women speakers at two scholarly events I organized at my law school. Professor Crawford did not speak with me about her concerns nor did I have any notice of the post. I came across it only by happenstance. Professor Crawford also closed comments to the post, so I was unable to respond there. I took the initiative to contact Dean Daniel Filler to seek an opportunity to respond, and he graciously offered to post my response.
Given that Professor Crawford did not contact me, she had no opportunity to ask me whether I made efforts to encourage a broad range of potential speakers, including women speakers, to submit abstracts for these events. I did. In addition to posting calls for papers on AALS Section listservs, I tried to think of a broad range of potential speakers and sent them emails encouraging them to submit an abstract.
I teach at a public university where we are committed to nondiscrimination. This means that we make efforts to broaden the applicant pool, whether for conference submissions or for faculty positions, for example, but once we have a list of the applicants, we do not evaluate any individual applicant better or worse because of a protected characteristic such as the individual’s sex.
Let me say more by way of an analogy. All law professors will be familiar with the law faculty hiring process. I have heard (and seen) that some law faculty hiring committees take note of an individual applicant’s sex or race in deciding whether to invite that applicant for an interview. These committees evaluate an individual applicant better or worse on the basis of a protected characteristic in order to achieve a slate of interviewees that the committee deems sufficiently diverse. I do not know whether Professor Crawford encourages her law school’s hiring committee to do this, but from her blog post I am guessing that the answer is in the affirmative. My view is that this is illegal. Outreach to broaden the applicant pool is one thing. Evaluating the individuals who actually apply is quite another.
My approach to conference speaker selection is precisely the same. I make efforts to circulate the calls for papers broadly and to draw the CFPs to the attention of a broad range of potential speakers. When evaluating the submitted abstracts, however, I judge each abstract on its individual merit, not on the protected characteristics of the author. I will not put a thumb on the scale in favor of or against any individual based on the individual’s protected characteristics in order to curate a panel or a conference with some percentage of this or that protected demographic.
Not that it matters, but if my records are correct, I accepted 100 percent (3 of 3) of the abstracts submitted by women professors for the 2024 event and 50 percent (1 of 2) of the abstracts submitted by women professors for the 2025 event. Professor Crawford could have learned these data if she had spoken with me.
I have no record of Professor Crawford submitting an abstract for either event. She is a member of at least one of the AALS Sections to which I circulated the CFPs. Yet without herself responding to my calls for papers so that she might be considered for a speaking role, and without inquiring privately with me about my efforts to broaden the pool of abstract submissions, she now criticizes me publicly for having an insufficient number of women speakers. I leave it to the readers of this blog to assess Professor Crawford’s blog post.
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