Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [62]
The meeting begins. Having started my work on covering, I sift what I hear through my framework. Many comments confirm that women, too, face covering demands. Female students describe pressure to mute attributes stereotypically associated with women, such as compassion, when speaking in class. Others assert peers and professors discredit work with a feminist bent. A mother says a female faculty mentor sent her to a clerkship interview with the parting advice “Don’t front the kid to the judge.”
But I also discern a contrapuntal theme—pressures that sound like the opposite of covering demands. A woman describes how a student received an anonymous letter telling her not to be so outspoken in class. Others report that professors are more likely to give housekeeping or hand-holding responsibilities to female teaching assistants. Such actions pressure women to be more like stereotypical women than stereotypical men. They are reverse-covering demands.
For the first time, I find myself entirely outside the covering experience I am considering. I recall an English professor asking whether the empathetic and analytic faculties are distinct: “Can we weep for the heroine while we admire the zoom shot?” I can choose to listen uncritically, to weep with these heroines. But I resolve not to suspend my disbelief. I look for zoom shots.
I wonder if the experience of being forced to quash emotional responses in class is specific to women. I, too, felt pressure to tone down such responses, and assumed it was part of becoming a lawyer. I remember being appalled when the “You talk too much” note was brought to my attention. But I wonder now how representative it is, given that it took only one person to send it. I teach many aggressive and brilliant women, who go off to high-powered clerkships, corporate jobs, and tenure-track positions every year. None of my students is in the room tonight. Does this mean disaffected law students find gender an acceptable place to put their angst? In short, I hear myself asking the questions a straight or white person might ask of my gay or Asian-American experience. I realize I am more likely here to be the source of the covering demand than its target. It is not a comfortable feeling.
And of course, if I reflect for even a moment, I know women are subjected to gender-specific covering demands. I modeled my own refusal to cover my gay activism on a mentor’s work on sex discrimination. She told me that when she was untenured, she was repeatedly warned off writing on gender issues. But she saw no point in being an academic if she didn’t write from her passions. So she lived like a graduate student, saving to go into a public interest job in the event she didn’t get tenure. She made her reputation writing on abortion, domestic violence, and housework. As a student, I admired her stringent adherence to principle—I took her class on sex discrimination in a local movie theater because she refused to cross picket lines during a strike at the university. To this day, when I read those cases, I smell popcorn.
So after the town-hall meeting, I take my critical self to the library to read up on gender dynamics in legal education. I’m most struck by the book Becoming Gentlemen by Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, and Jane Balin—professors, respectively, of law, psychology, and sociology. In a study conducted in 1990–91, these researchers found that although women and men entered the University of Pennsylvania Law School with identical credentials, men were two to three times more likely to rise to the top 10 percent of their class. The book explains this discrepancy by arguing that long after traditionally male institutions admit women, they retain cultures favoring men.
In unpacking that culture, the book describes the covering and reverse-covering demands articulated at the Yale meeting. On the one hand, it recounts how women at Penn experienced pressure to desexualize themselves, to eschew stereotypically feminine traits, and to avoid feminist activism. In the words of one professor, women