"I was intimidated when I was young," Franklin says. "[But] I haven't noticed women participate less in the classroom. In fact they do come to speak to me more during my office hours."

Like faculty members, female undergraduates do not agree on the extent to which Harvard women face discrimination in the classroom.

"I have generally felt for a long time that women do tend to speak less in class, and this is sadly in effect here. I, however, have not personally felt it," says Lamelle D. Rawlins '99, the Undergraduate Council secretary.

Two sophomore pre-meds who wish to remain anonymous agree that they have noticed a marked difference in talk time between females and males.

"In the large lecture classes like [organic chemistry], it is evident that women do not speak nearly as much as men," says one sophomore.

"Not to mention the fact that it doesn't help that there are so few women T.F.s, if any at all," adds the other woman.

But another woman, a junior concentrating in government and women's studies who wishes to identified only as Jane, denies that women participate less in class.

"I think this whole attitude furthers the perception of women as weak and inferior," says Jane. "In my experience in Historical Study A, government and women's studies classes, women are just as vocal as men, if not more so."

Nevertheless, Porter Professor of Philosophy Robert Nozick has commented more than once in his Philosophy 192: "Thinking About Thinking" class that women tend not to raise their hands to speak during the question-and-answer period of the course.

Survey Data

Krupnick's 1984 Harvard study verifies the impressions of undergraduate women who have sensed discrimination in the classroom.

In responding to questions from instructors, Krupnick says, women are more contemplative, while men quicker to answer. She refers to this phenomenon as the "tyranny of fast reaction time."

"Males use most of the time because they are the first to talk," she says. "Many male students put up their hands before they think of what to say; their thoughts are incomplete."

As men continue to speak in order to qualify their answers, women are deprived of an opportunity to talk, Krupnick argues.

Krupnick's report gives four major reasons for women's reluctance to speak out and speak first: "Their demographic status as members of a minority in the classroom, their inability or unwillingness to compete against men, their vulnerability to interruption and the fact that men and women talk in runs."