The Law School has also taken steps to accommodate faculty members—both male and female—who want to balance both their personal life and their professional careers.

Law School professor David B. Wilkins ’77, who is an expert on gender issues in the legal profession, said that an important obstacle to women’s success is the simultaneous timing, in many cases, of pursuing a tenure-track position and choosing to raise a family.

To this end, Harvard Law School offers a parental leave program and allows faculty members to extend the period necessary to be considered for tenure, Minow said.

“I’m a woman, I’m a mother,” she said. “It’s a priority for me to allow people to have meaningful lives, work, and family.”

A GENDERED FEELING?

Before she came to Harvard in 2010, Law School professor Vicki C. Jackson taught and held associate deanships at Georgetown University Law Center. At Georgetown, she said, the more gender-balanced faculty created a remarkably different environment.

“It felt different just in terms of more women, more women at the workshops, and more women at the faculty,” she said, acknowledging that many other factors contributed to her perception.

For some professors like Jackson who have spent time at other law schools, Harvard’s gender disparity creates a distinct atmosphere around lunch tables and faculty workshops.

“For a variety of reasons, including the gender disparity, the faculty culture does have what I think scholars of this topic would describe as a masculine attitude, a way of presenting yourself and your arguments that has gender associations,” Law School professor Mark V. Tushnet ’67 said, adding that “assertive, outright statements” take precedence in faculty conversations.

Field said that as a result, engaging in faculty discussions becomes much more difficult for professors who are less outgoing.

“The first thing you have to learn how to do here is how to interrupt,” she said. “I think you’re considered smarter if you are showing off.”

Others, including Law School professor Jeannie Suk, disagreed, saying that they think the faculty environment is very accepting of female professors.

“On the treatment of women, there is no doubt that the experience of my generation—who began their academic careers in a law school with a female dean in a university with a female president—is likely very different from that of prior generations of HLS faculty,” Suk said. “I imagine those experiences would inevitably shape the individual views and perceptions of the faculty today.”

Some professors said that the gender imbalance impacts not only the tenor of the discussion, but also the topics of conversation and research.

“When I go to conferences, I hear about lots of topics that are quite interesting that you wouldn’t hear about here,” Field said, citing reproductive law as an example. “There are some major law schools that have these kinds of dynamic discussions all the time.”