At the MSU Law Review Symposium on "Gender and the Legal Profession's Pipeline to Power," Professor Paula Monopoli (Maryland) is talking about masculine norms in the legal academy. She is focusing today on pay equity, a smaller part of her larger project. On pay equity issue, she makes three points:
Female full professors earn 88% of what male full professors earn. Pay-scale information is not transparent. Even in public institutions, it can be hard to get the information (making it physcially available only in hard copy, behind a circulation desk on another campus; when available, the information is not complete). The norm in legal academia is not to talk about money (we're supposed to be in the field for the love of ideas). Women are less likely to negotiate for themselves. Moving up the "ranks" or getting a salary increase often requires doing a visit, but women may be less likely than men to accept visits.
Benchmarks used to measure performance in legal academy disfavor women. Less credit is given to good teaching or service to the institution, (both typically associated with women). There need to be more empirical benchmarks for faculty evaluation.
If scholarship continues to be primary benchmark by which legal academics are measured, we need to change the conditions under which scholarship is produced. Work on gender, family law, inheritance law is devauled by "top" journals. The quantitative expectation for annual scholarly productivity is becoming excessive.
My summary doesn't do justice to Professor Monopoli's larger project, so keep eyes out for her published work.
"Less credit is given to good teaching or service to institution (both typically associated with women)." Wow, that's a really sexist claim.
In what way is it sexist, anon?
As there are less women in academia than men statistically, women do tend to be over-represented on committees etc which takes up more of their time and generally isn't weighted as highly in promotion and tenure decisions. (This is the same for minorities.)
So if women spend more time doing things that are less valued and have less time to spend on things that are more valued, why is it a sexist claim?
It might be a sexist claim if you interpreted it as asserting that women were better teachers or administrators than men – I haven't seen any evidence that such a claim would be true – but I don't think that's what's being said here. I think the claim is that women spend more time than men on things that are less heavily weighted in salary and promotion decisions. And this isn't a novel claim at all. This point has been made before with respect to both women and minorities.
I believe the suggestion made in the original post is that women excel at teaching and service beyond the teaching and service of men.
You claim, "As there are less women in academia than men statistically, women do tend to be over-represented on committees etc which takes up more of their time and generally isn't weighted as highly in promotion and tenure decisions. (This is the same for minorities.)"
Do you have statistics or is this anecdotal evidence? If you have statistics, I would be very interested in knowing the source. If that's statistically true, I think it's reprehensible, and someone should expose the offending schools.
Speaking of anecdotal evidence, I know of a number of schools that no longer interview or seriously consider white male candidates, unless there are absolutely zero other options in the field. No one talks about that though. It's odd that the level playing field seems to mean instant equality, which in the long run will mean that white males are grossly underrepresented in the academia as the generation of white males who actually benefited from discrimination retire from the academy. Someone should expose these schools also, but no one will because that person would be denounced as a racist and sexist.
Anon,
I find your claim of rampant bias against white males very hard to believe. If there are such schools out there, why don't you "expose" them? After all, you have the cloak of anonymity — what is stopping you?
Anna, good point . . . I'll get to work on it and publish it anonymously. Thanks for the idea! I'm guessing you are probably either are blind to the fact that discrimination can happen to white males or you've decided it is a good thing. The fact that you can't conceive of a school in 200 ABA law schools that might discriminate against white males is remarkable. I can think of four institutions off the top of my head. Perhaps, you are right that it isn't "rampant," but your lack of sympathy for it shows your own bias.
Anon – I think the claim was that women are over-represented in admin work, not that they're better than men at it. But I agree the wording in the post looks ambiguous.
There are lots of statistics out there re women and minorities being over-represented on committees in particular, the idea being that the committee is not 'representative' of the faculty if there aren't women or minorities on the committee, but of course there are less in the profession overall so the burden falls disproportionately on them.
Certainly, the ABA and AALS have done a lot of work on this and there are statistics available – I think you could get a fair amount of detail from the AALS committees on women and minorities. They do regular studies on these issues, and present regularly at annual meetings on these issues.
I also agree that sometimes it's difficult for white male candidates when law school appointments committees are being pressured to focus on diversity, and it's a very difficult balance to strike ie to find the best candidates, and ensure fairness to all applicants. It is illegal to discriminate in either direction, but different hiring committees face different pressures from the university, and the accreditation bodies from year to year.
I don't think that white males will be grossly underrepresented in legal academia in the future. I've seen no evidence that the problem is as stark as you suggest and I've had a lot of experience on appointments committees over the years. My own school has hired more white males than women and minorities in recent years, and I'm sure we're not alone.
Put service aside for the moment (it is conceivable that the desire for some rough proportionality on committees places a greater burden on smaller numbers of women faculty). As to teaching the statement is pretty unambiguous: The post says that good teaching *and* service to the institution are "both typically associated with women". Is good teaching really "typically associated with women"? I've seen great women teachers and bad women teachers and everything in between, just as I've seen great male teachers and bad male teachers and everything in between. I don't instinctively connect gender to teaching quality. If anything, the statement also directly contradicts a common complaint about student evaluations (which, by the way, I find convincing at the margins): that women receive harsher or more negative evals because students find women either not authoritative enough (and thus not respected as "professors") or "bithcy".
As for changing scholarship standards, there are two different points there. The point about placement may be true (again, some empirical study would be possible). But I'm not sure why the second point is true–or more true for women than men. I have no reason to believe (nor have I experienced) that women who are committed to writing are systematically less able to write 3-5 articles in six years (roughly the tenure standard at most schools).
Professor Lipton is correct that I am not making the claim that women are better teachers than men. The MSU conference explored the issue of why, if women have been graduating from law schools in significant numbers since the 1980s, we do not have parity in formal leadership positions in the various sectors of the profession. Some speakers addressed the lack of parity in private practice, some the judiciary and I focused on the legal academy. My talk explored why – given the pipeline has been full for almost thirty years – only twenty-five percent of full professors are women. The reasons I posit are complex and nuanced. The role of “scholar” is itself highly gendered and in the context of the ancient origins of the workplace we inhabit – the academy – it is associated with the masculine. The role of “teacher” is also gendered and is more closely associated with the feminine. Reason has historically been deemed a male attribute while nurture is more closely associated with the feminine.
So the explanations as to why women have met with friction in ascending to tenured, full faculty positions are embedded in ancient norms about who is a scholar. There are also conditions of the modern university that, while seemingly gender neutral, have a disparate impact on the ability of women – who are still disproportionately burdened with the work of social reproduction – to achieve the status of full professor and significant indicia of scholarly achievement like endowed chairs. These seemingly gender-neutral norms are constructed with the ideal scholar in mind – a person without caregiving responsibilities. Thus, norms and practices that appear neutral – like requiring a visit and then a year back at one’s home institution before receiving a competitive offer – disadvantage women, who as Joan Williams has noted, have partners who are less likely to be willing to follow a visiting spouse and who are often more concerned about the impact on their children such mobility may impose.
Norms about which kind of scholarship is more valuable reflect this gender hierarchy as well – thus the valorization of constitutional law and the devaluation of gender and family law. These signals are communicated to students on editorial boards who make selections accordingly. If where articles place is factored into promotions and rewards like chaired professorships, this is another apparently neutral norm which has a disparate effect on women who tend to write and teach more frequently in these areas of law.
Finally, many scholars have noted the increase in the amount of scholarship deemed necessary to predict that a young scholar is sufficiently committed to the enterprise to continue publishing in the future. The disproportionate responsibilities of caregiving combined with the tendency for women (and minorities) to be asked to do more institutional work and to be sought out by students more frequently for advice and support all combine with the increasing volume of scholarship to create barriers to women moving up the ranks to full faculty positions.
To the degree that one factor, scholarship, is weighted more heavily in tenure and promotions decisions, the conditions described above will tend to disadvantage women. This disadvantage also tends to explain the pay disparity between men and women, even when controlling for rank.
When looked at through the lens of historical context, gender norms and organizational theory, the fact that women make up only twenty-five percent tenured, full professors can be explained quite clearly. Whether and how we go about restructuring the academy to facilitate parity is the question I am exploring in this project.
I have deleted the word "good" and the parentheses, as indicated in the post, in an effort to clarify. I did NOT understand Professor Monopoli to say that good teaching is associated exclusively with women, or that women are better teachers than men. I understood her to say that traditional faculty performance evaluations tend to give less weight to teaching and service than to scholarship.
Is there any evidence that women are denied tenure at a rate different from men? (Which, in the case of law schools, is very rare). Or post-tenure promotion or the award of chairs? I actually would not be surprised at the latter, considering women typically devote more time to childcare than men, but I am not aware of any study showing it.
And I cannot help but notice that fields like tax law and commercial law are, like family law, not much favored by the top law reviews, but I doubt this is due to any "gender hierarchy."
I'm looking forward to reading more about this.
Changing the focus of conversation a little bit, might I suggest that someone use the publicly available salary data, which Dan Filler often links to (his posts are collected at the "faculty compensation" category on the left hand column of this blog) and try some simple correlations of compensation of faculty members with years in the academy, number of citations on westlaw (which I take to be a very rough approximation of scholarly importance — also heavily influenced by years in the academy), and gender.
That's all easily available data. There are a lot of other important factors — like teaching and service — that aren't captured with those data. One might to add a variable for prestige of primary area of teaching (this is going to be pretty subjective). Taking up the point on teaching, I'd love to have a measure of that (teaching quality — however that's measured — and perhaps amount of teaching, like student credit hours), but I don't know how that could easily be obtained.
If women take on caregiving duties in higher proportions than men – how it is controversial that there are less female partners at law firms or less full female professors at law schools? It seems sensible that regardless of the metrics used to evaluate professionals (in this context, law professors), time worked tends to help with all of them. Said differently, law professors who work more tend to be able to publish more, put more time into their teaching, put more time into their service work, and thus be more successful as a professional. When I was practicing, I noted this dynamic (that the most successful partners tended to be those who worked all the time) and now that I am a law professor I see it too (I seem to recall reading something a year or two ago that discussed how some of the most prolific law professors are those who have no familial responsibilities). Why is it controversial that people working more tend to achieve more, and are paid more for that success?
Could it be that women are more "successful" in their homes and leading more fulfilling lives by investing in their families – and that they are less prone to pressures which would cause them to spend less time with their families to achieve more success outside the home? If so, why should we then insist on equal results outside of the home?
Also, as someone who went on the teaching market within the last few years, I would confirm the observations about how difficult it is to be hired as a white male. I was repeatedly told by members of appointments committees, privately, that it would be very difficult for me to receive a callback, get hired, or be voted #1 in the polling hierarchy since I was a white male. And lest there be any questions, I was told this explicitly and in no uncertain terms on many occasions. For every time I was actually told this, I can only assume there were 1 or 2 other places where this was true – but had the good sense not to tell me. So, setting aside whether there will be diminishing numbers of white males in legal academia 30 years from now, I wonder how this can be a good means for the ends of securing diversity.
Professor Lipton,
Could you share your school's doctrinal hiring statistics with regards to white males, women, and minorities for the past five years? I was curious about your statement that your school has hired more white males in recent years. I assume you are referring to doctrinal hiring and I found this information online from your school's recent hires and it does not appear that your school has hired more white male doctrinal professors recently. http://law.case.edu/Home/News/tabid/251/vw/1/ItemID/150/Default.aspx
In fact, it would appear that your school suffers from the same problem that is being discussed in this thread. I reviewed your school's faculty and it appears that if I listed the most recent hires that it would contain a disproportionate number of women and minorities in the last five years. I am specifically referring to doctrinal hiring as it appears this thread is focused on those positions.
Can you provide more specific information about this? As a female attorney, I am quite dismayed to read that so many white males are being told by hiring committees that they will not be considered seriously because of gender and race. I do not see the advancement of women as an opportunity to support discrimination against another group.
White males have an incredibly difficult time on the market. I am not going to "out" my school, but it appears that about 25% of our faculty refuses to vote for white male candidates. Period. They believe that our faculty is "out of balance" and refuse to vote for a non-minority/non-female candidate until our faculty reflects the society at large (not the pool of qualified canidates, but society). Of course our professors know, as Professor Lipton knows, that discrimination, in either direction, is illegal, so they try to hide their bias a bit. But they hide it very poorly. The same professors vote and speak out against every white male candidate, no matter how qualified. The rest of the professors seem to be trying to find the best fit for the school – all things considered. This is a real problem in academia and people should be talking about it at least as much as they are talking about the "discrimination" against minorities and females. Can you imagine a symposium on the struggles of a young white male in the academy? Or how how about a Workshop for Pretenured Caucasian Law School Teachers (See, the AALS workshop for "People of Color" June 23-24, 2012)? Personally, I would love to be a female or minority on the market or in the academy today. It seems like there is a program every month specifically aimed at helping you achieve your goals – if you are a minority or female. Maybe if female/minorities spent less time whining about their "plight" they could actually write more. Not a single female in the SSRN top ten.
Professor Lipton,
Your school could be discriminating even if your school has hired more white males than females/minorities. I don't know the exact numbers, but I have seen the AALS pool. I am guessing that 65% of the qualified candidates are white male (and that number might be low, depending on how you define "qualified"). Those white males are hired at a much lower rate than they deserve. At my school, we have only hired one white male in our last 7 or 8 hires, and that was in a subject area with very few females/minorities. And in that one case, we actually offered to a female first — she turned us down for a higher ranked school. And yes, a number of professors still thinks we are "out of balance." Someone should compare the applicant pool and the hired pool. White males do much worse on average, I am sure. Those who do place, probably place lower than they "should."
Is it just me, or is someone whining about female/minority academics whining about their plight really, really funny?
Also, with respect to the substantive point of this commentary — such as it is — after a couple of articles, I've learned that you should always try to get a couple of women to agree to be outside readers. They tend to give you detailed and thoughtful comments (as if they've actually read the whole thing!), and usually in time to be useful. Men tend to be along the lines of "I know it's March 15, but in case you can still use this, I thought the paper was interesting, and here's one tangential point I would have made if I had written the same article."
LawProf, CWRU's last four entry-level tenure-track hires have all been white males (three hired last year, one this year).
That is interesting, but obviously a very small sample size. What about the two years before that? And I would be more interested in the numbers across the academy. To the white male on the market in 2012, good luck!
Anon, I think the earlier post was referring to doctrinal hiring specifically. CWRU has only hired two white male doctrinal entry-level candidates in the past two years, two non-white male lateral candidates, and two male clinical candidates.
However, lateral doctrinal hiring should be considered too. It has been my experience that white male lateral candidates also have a difficult time moving schools. I think they experience the same bias that is being discussed in this thread. If women want equality, then they should be willing to stand up against these discrimatory practices against white males in the academy.
Given the overwhelming number of comments regarding white male hiring in the academy, perhaps The Faculty Lounge bloggers should dedicate a separate blog post to the issue of discrimination towards white males. Clearly, several white males in the academy posted about their experiences with being told that their opportunities are limited because of both gender and race. It would benefit the academy as a whole if its members came forward with names of schools and faculties that have explicitly told them that discrimination against white males is alive and well (and acceptable). Maybe an equality scholar could dedicate an article to this topic?
I find great irony in the fact there is deafening silence from the women in this thread now that several white males have come forward with their stories about discrimination against them. The fact that law school faculties are practicing discrimination towards white males is abhorrent. When did law school professors decide that they did not have to follow anti-discrimination laws?
Anon,
It is hard for us to come forward with the names of the schools. The academy is a small place. For me, it was hard for me guess who was discriminating early on – though I guessed many were, as I received many fewer interviews than minority/female friends with very similar (and in some cases "worse") resumes. I did, however, hear from a couple of professors at schools where I received callbacks, but no offers. Who knows if they were only trying to make me feel better, but two of them basically said – "if you were not a white/male, you would have received this offer." Obviously, that is not a "smart" thing for them to say. I would hate to punish them for saying it. And they would know who told on them, even if I commented on the specific school without revealing my identity.
Likewise, I would rather not call out my home institution. I am pre-tenure.
Like I said, I am not sure whether the other professors at other schools were just trying to "let me down easy" by saying I was the top pick but for my gender/race — that is certainly possible. But I can say with certainty that there is a large percentage of my own faculty who speaks out against any potential white male hire ("We can't hire another white male until we have more balance on the faculty." Etc.) The allow vote against any white male candidate, no matter how qualified.
For example, I think a minority female with a JD from Northwestern or Texas, a federal district court clerkship, one article in the 50-100 range and two years at a regional firm would beat out a white male from Columbia or Stanford with a federal appellate clerkship, two articles in the 30-50 range and three years at a big firm. And sadly, I think my school might not even get the minority female I just described because some higher ranked school would offer her – depending on the subject area. Make them both white males and the first person described might not even get an academic job at all.
To the person who said I am whining, yes I recognize the irony. That said, there are no conferences where we white males get together and whine together. And if we organized a conference aimed at only helping white males, (like AALS does for "people of color") I cannot imagine the backlash.
I would just ditto everything that LawProf said. My experience was eerily similar. I am now a pretenure law professor. I would not call out my home institution, nor would I call out any places that said what they said. At the end of the day, no amount of principle is worth sacrificing your professional career. At the time, I just accepted that such discrimination (against me as a white male) would require higher levels of accomplishment to get the same job. But it was a job that I really wanted and is tremendous, and that is what I focused on. The current status of the law school hiring process – and, in my case, the way in which overt and “but for” discrimination was frequently communicated to me – is egregious. I think the saddest part of all of this is that I went to law school in strong support of such preferences – but now having seen how they often operate dispositively, not just as a factor – my support has dried up.
Trying to decide whether to put my name in the hat this year or to wait. So take LawProf's second candidate. Assume a USDC and not COA clerkship. Assume a roughly equal number of years of government work (AUSA or similar) to go along with the national firm experience. Assume one article is slightly better than the 30-50 range, and one article is slightly worse.
Chances? (And yes, I know that the right answer here is to do a VAP or fellowship. That would be prohibitively difficult for a variety of reasons.)
Anonjrprof,
I'm sorry to tell you that working harder still will not be enough if you want to lateral. As the original post demonstrates, if you work harder, your chances on the lateral market will still be low. In addition, Professor Monopoli is working hard to explain away all of your hard work.
I am curious why The Faculty Lounge is unwilling to do a series of posts on this topic. The number of comments on this post exceeds the number of comments on most of the other posts on this site. Perhaps, the agenda on The Faculty Lounge is the same as the agenda in the vast majority of other faculty lounges throughout the nation.
When people tell you that you didn't get the job because you are a white male, they are trying to let you down gently. You really didn't get hired because this is your research agenda: http://i.imgur.com/zsZ7f.jpg
Let's also keep in mind that a professor or two telling a candidate "You would have gotten the job if you hadn't been a white male" does not mean that a candidate would have gotten the job if he hadn't been a white male. That was the impression of that professor. It has been my experience/observation that many such "impressions" are created by the professor being either unhappy with not getting his or her way in who was hired or angered by the very concept of diversity.
Exerting more effort to recruit and evaluate women or minority candidates does not equate with giving preference to those candidates over white males.
LawProf said: "For example, I think a minority female with a JD from Northwestern or Texas, a federal district court clerkship, one article in the 50-100 range and two years at a regional firm would beat out a white male from Columbia or Stanford with a federal appellate clerkship, two articles in the 30-50 range and three years at a big firm. And sadly, I think my school might not even get the minority female I just described because some higher ranked school would offer her – depending on the subject area. Make them both white males and the first person described might not even get an academic job at all."
This is an example. There's nothing in your description that shows that the white male candidate is a better choice than the minority female candidate. Yes, those indicators are used to narrow candidates because there is a serious information problem inherent in the admittedly screwed up academic hiring market. But, in my 12 or so years in the academy, the faculty vote is based on the which candidate is the best candidate. I've seen very strident supporters of the need for diversity vote for the white male candidate over a "diversity candidate."
The only real difference in treatment I've seen is that diversity candidates with "lesser apparent qualifications" (as described by LawProf above) will get callbacks where a non diversity candidate with the same qualifications would not. But that is not to say that the diversity candidate took that non-diversity candidate's spot. They didn't take a spot away, because that candidate was not getting a callback or interview regardless of whether the diversity candidate got a callback/interview or not. And the diversity candidate did not take a spot away from a white male candidate with higher "apparent qualifications." Instead, the committee just invited more candidates back to campus. (I can't speak to schools beyond those I've been at in this regard.) In other words, yes, the school/committee/faculty spent greater effort to identify (through call backs for example) qualified diversity candidates, but I don't think that is a problem or even discriminatory.
Why not? Because the hiring process at the early stages relies largely on criteria (placement, clerkships, publications, etc) that are themselves often subject to negative effects on diversity candidates. Therefore, schools need to go "deeper" into candidate pools to identify diversity candidates who are potentially of the same quality as non diversity candidates.
Does the non diversity candidate who has the second level of "qualification criteria" have a reason to be upset? Sure, but it's not because of any efforts put towards diversity. A diverse candidate is not taking his place, because he's not getting a look in the first place. He should be angry that the hiring process is so poor at the early stages that he doesn't get a chance to show his quality.
Anon White Male Prof,
You can look at the hiring practices of many schools and tell instantly that they don't hire white males. The fact that someone happens to tell you this just confirms it. Trust me, I work at a school that only hired women and minorities for a number of years. If I tell a white male candidate this fact, it doesn't make it any less true. The fact that you won't accept this reflects a blindness to a very real problem. Maybe, your school doesn't do, but I can tell you about a number of schools that do.
Additionally, your argument stating hiring based on "lesser apparent qualifications" is blatantly illegal unless you have some objective reason for hiring the candidate other than race and gender.
To those in this thread who believe they have experienced reverse discrimination: please post how many top-30 articles you have published in the last 5 years, so that we have a basis on which to evaluate your claims. Thanks.
The last demand should only be relevant if we determine the same information for all hires.
Seems like an off-hand, off-the-mark demand to me, with an inference that is plainly false.
Is that the best defense?
It would be better to have school names/particular practices to evaluate, but I get that people don't feel comfortable burning those bridges. So, publications are the next best metric to evaluate quality, and disclosing the number of publications still preserves confidentiality. I think it's a fair demand. Or stated more simply: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pics-or-it-didnt-happen
thankslens of historical context, gender norms and organizational theory, the fact that women make up only twenty-five percent tenured, full professors can be explained quite clearly. Whether and how we go about restructuring the academy to facilitate parity
From Tenured Prof:
"Additionally, your argument stating hiring based on "lesser apparent qualifications" is blatantly illegal unless you have some objective reason for hiring the candidate other than race and gender."
You may want to re-read my post. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I wrote it quite quickly, and looking back, I don't think I did a good job with my terminology. I stated that the most qualified candidate was the one hired in my experience. "Lesser apparent qualifications" as used in my post (and as should be clear upon a careful reading of the post) refers to things like law school jd, placement, firm experience, etc. that are just unfortunate, poor ways to do initial sorting where little to no really valuable information is available. As I said the hiring decisions were made on actual information gained from interviews, job talks, more interviews, actual reading of scholarship, conversations with references and were then based on who was the best candidate, regardless of gender or ethnicity or race.
At the schools I have been at over the past decade, the majority of hires, both entry level and lateral, have been white males, and when you factor in that many of the women hired have been for designated legal writing positions that pay considerably less, then it's a substantial majority of white males.
Certainly, I believe you when you say that the hiring at other schools has differed. I'm not convinced that is a bad thing judged upon the needs of an educational institution, but it is a more difficult issue, I'll grant.
Anon White Male Prof,
You state, "Certainly, I believe you when you say that the hiring at other schools has differed [and hired based on race and gender]. I'm not convinced that is a bad thing judged upon the needs of an educational institution, but it is a more difficult issue, I'll grant."
Even if it is not "a bad thing," it's still illegal. I certainly hope you don't teach employment discrimination. I never realized that law schools are exempt from compliance with the law.
They aren't exempt. They just act that way.
I find it amazing that the owners of this blog have stopped weighing in. I blog elsewhere, and I would kill for a scholarly discussion like this. Of course, there lack of response highlights their bias Professor Crawford is already on to her next post on women in legal education.
My sense is that just like the many who are fearful about "outing" the outright illegal discrimination at their own law schools (for fear of retribution), the named "owners" of this blog don't want to confirm that they support/practice it (for fear of the legal consequences). A suit in New York on these grounds recently failed. But, stay tuned. The day to answer always will come.
That doesn't explain the failure of Professor Lipton to address the hiring of CWRU, which she clearly asserted had hired more white males in recent years. If the "owners" of this blog are that concerned about the legal consequences, perhaps they shouldn't be asserting the fact that this isn't a rampant problem in the academy.
I'm also curious as to why nobody is seriously addressing the fact that there are, at least from the comments in the blog, several schools that have only hired 1 or 2 whites males for every 7 – 8 hires. Professor Lipton wrote "I don't think that white males will be grossly underrepresented in legal academia in the future." How can she assert this statement and then decline to defend it? If schools are hiring white males in a disproportionally low number compared to women and minorities, then how will white males NOT be underrepresented when the white males who did benefit from discriminatory hiring practices retire?
I have personally heard the statement (relating to white males hired before this era) "We just have to wait for them to die off."
The person who made this statement seemed to pride herself in rubbing my nose in it. She glowed with pleasure as she said to me:
"The last thing we need around here is another middle-aged white male."
She seemed to enjoy being able to inflict humiliation on the "other" with her hurtful words and harmful bigotry. She had obviously said this sort of thing many times before.
As I was a candidate, and she a decider, I was struck by how she was able to work illegal age, gender and race discrimination into one off-hand remark, all without even the slightest hint of self-awareness or concern.
Anon White Prof,
"The hiring process at the early stages relies largely on criteria (placement, clerkships, publications, etc) that are themselves often subject to negative effects on diversity candidates."
This is simply not true anymore. Just look at any school's admissions data – esp. the Yales and Harvards of the world. They are letting in diversity candidates that have much lower scores than other students. Also, judges are becoming more diversity conscious and overcompensating by hiring diversity candidates who are less qualified. I cannot imagine an articles editor caring if the author was white/male and many of these reviews are blind or semiblind. Large firms work the same way as the academy. Minority candidates have stars next to their names and are more highly sought after. (I was on the hiring committee at a top-5 firm). Therefore, often the criteria needed is often actually easier to obtain for diversity candidates – not the other way around. 20 years ago, I may agree with you. Diversity candidates may have had a harder time in some of these areas. But look at the most recent hiring reports – most of the candidates got into law school less than 10 years ago.
Calling diversity candidates back that have lesser surface qualifications reeks of discrimination. The AALS meeting is too short to determine much other than whether the person seems personable and can hold a halfway decent conversation. I doubt that the diversity candidates consistently outperform the white/males in these short interviews. Obviously, if you get a callback you get to "show your stuff" and your chances of getting an offer are fairly high. If diversity candidates get many callbacks, they will land a offer somewhere. If similarly qualified white/males are not even called back, they don't even have a chance.
This needs to be blogged about.
The silence on the part of the author of this post and the other regular contributors to this blog is deafening. I'm disappointed by the unwillingness of the folks who post around here to engage with their readers or at the very least back up their own assertions.
But soon this post will be off of the front page, and we can all pretend this conversation never happened.
This is definitely something no one seems to want to talk about. I don't quite understand why since it is clearly an issue with salience for many law profs (including myself) – and is undeniably relevant to how we are currently repopulating our ranks each year.
Some of this discussion is fairly breathtaking. Minorities and women enter the academy – still in 2012 – in the context of a long history of discrimination, explicit and implicit, legally sanctioned and informally practiced. There is no such context or historical backdrop for white males. If, all other things being equal, a hiring committee wants to try to rectify a gross imbalance in the representativeness of its faculty it may result in offers first to a minority candidate who has equivalent credentials, experience, etc. as a non-minority candidate. Of course the difficulty is in the "all things being equal" requirement. It may be very difficult for someone who has been passed over to see that the candidate who was preferred was in fact superior in some aspects – particularly since candidates don't see the interviews of other candidates. I can't say what other schools do, but I can say that we have always striven to get the best possible faculty as well as a diverse faculty. As it happens (not surprisingly given their representation in the pool of eligible candidates) in the last few years most of those candidates have been white males. But most of the candidates we did not ask for a callback were also white males. That does not mean that those candidates were discriminated against because they were white males (or for any other reason). White males make up the majority of applicants. I suspect, but cannot know for sure, that some of those who "confidentially" tell candidates that they will not be selected because they are white males, are (a) incorrect (that is they don't represent the committee or its practices) and (b) are saying this because of their own perception that attempting to redress centuries of discrimination and under-representation and assembling a faculty that is more reflective of the society at large is an illegitimate enterprise. (And this is an appalling breach to talk this way to a candidate by the way.) I suppose we will soon know more about what this Court considers acceptable actions in regard to attempting to redress historic discrimination, but I think we are far away from having to worry that white males are being unfairly discriminated against in the market for law teaching. And it is *fewer* law professors and *less* time.
You are right, job seekers don't see the other interviewees, but I, as a tenured track professor, do. And at both schools I have worked for, the discrimination against white males was not only clear, but those discriminating did not even try hard to hide it. All you have to do is look at the assistant law profesor ranks. Find me a white male, assistant professor at a decent school who was not a "rock star" by the criteria that matters – publications, clerkships, law school, law review board, etc. For every one, I will find you multiple female/minority assistant law profs with worse stats. Also, I am sorry, not all of those female/minority profs are much better teachers than the white males who were not hired. Plus, let us admit it, teaching is not what most hiring decisions are based on in the legal academy. Finally, those high ranked law schools and prestigious judges are actually reverse discriminating now. So, at the very least, minorities/females should not have room to complain if law schools started judging solely on the merits.