A recent op-ed in the Record called attention to persisting gender disparities at HLS, including on Law Review, HLAB and with Latin honors. This week revealed another stark gender disparity at the law school: women appear to be far more pro-choice and men far more pro-life. The gender disparity on this issue at the Law School is much greater than the national divide, leading to a hypothesis that stems from how women got into the room in the first place: women need reproductive justice to have an equal shot at professional achievement and admission to law schools like Harvard.
On Tuesday, Students for Reproductive Justice and Students for Life held competing lunch talks. One was about telling the Supreme Court stories about women’s experiences with abortion in the context of the Whole Women’s Health case. One was about the argument that fetuses are full persons. Both events were well attended. But at the pro-choice event, the crowd was 80-90% female. At the fetal rights event, attendees were 80-90% male.
I posted photos of the two crowds on Facebook, and a friend pointed out that national numbers are somewhat closer: 54 percent of women identify as pro-choice, compared to 46 percent of men. Yet there were too many people at each event for the gender difference to have been a statistical fluke. What then explains the divergence at Harvard Law?
There are many reasons why the Harvard Law student body is not representative of America at large. We skew younger, more progressive and are from wealthier backgrounds. But there’s one other key difference: we are all high-achieving. And control over whether and when to have children is far more crucial in enabling women to advance professionally than it is for men. At the law school, I know dozens of male students with children of varying ages. I only know three women with kids. That’s not to say it’s impossible for women who have kids at a young age to succeed at the highest levels – after all Elizabeth Warren had her first child at 19 – but there is a hugely disparate impact, often due to the expectation and reality that most women put in far more than 50% of the effort into raising a child, not to mention the physical burdens of pregnancy.
In the wake of posting the event photos, pro-life men have pointed out to me that plenty of women agree with them. That is true. But in part due to a lack of control over their reproductive lives, those women are far less likely to be able to end up at HLS or anywhere comparable. In the pending Supreme Court case Whole Women’s Health, the lawyers’ brief told the stories of 112 female lawyers who maintain that they would not have been able to achieve their professional success had they not had abortions when younger. I doubt their male partners would have faced the same degree of professional limitation had abortion not been an option.
Since Roe v. Wade, abortion has been framed as a privacy interest. The attendees of the Students for Reproductive Justice event[1] know a truth that many of our male classmates and our judges would be wise to learn: without access to control over our reproductive lives, women can never have a shot at equality either at HLS or in the broader world.
[1] Not all attendees of either event agree with the speaker (after all I stopped by the Students for Life event to take photos), but it shouldn’t be too extreme to insist that event attendance correlates with views.
Sarah Gitlin is a 3L at Harvard Law School.