Gender gaps in legal education: The impact of class participation assessments

Abstract

The gender gap is a well-studied phenomenon in education policy. Although prior research has illustrated the presence of this gap in US Law Schools, questions remain as to whether these findings are generalizable to other jurisdictions where national, cultural, historical, institutional, and societal norms are substantially different. In this article, we investigate the presence and nature of a gender gap in one of Asia's leading law schools, the National University of Singapore (“NUS Law”). Employing a novel dataset with granular data on student, instructor, course, and component characteristics, we provide evidence that the gender gap persists over numerous cohorts of students. Despite controlling for a wide range of covariates such as standardized entry scores, income proxies, and a large array of fixed effects, female students at NUS Law systemically underperform their male counterparts across numerous metrics of law school performance. To investigate potential causal mechanisms behind the gender gap, we exploit a natural experiment in which NUS Law randomly assigned first- and second-year students to a range of compulsory courses with different class participation assessment weights. We provide evidence that female students who were assigned to courses with larger class participation weights had relatively lower class participation scores when compared to their male counterparts. Our work suggests that pedagogical policy should consider the choice of assessment modes with a view to narrowing the gender gap in legal education. Our study is distinctive within existing studies on the relationship between gender and class participation in legal education as it utilizes a comprehensive dataset of student scores, instead of relying on observational studies and self-reporting surveys which are more commonly used.