When Barack Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, he faced a heated battle with the law school's Women’s Law Association (WLA) because women comprised only 25% of the editors selected for the Review during his tenure.
At that time, the Review’s president (with the help of two other editors) oversaw the selection of the new editors of the journal. All Harvard Law students were eligible to apply to the Review at the end of their first year by entering its writing competition, which involved editing an article and/or writing a case comment. New editors were chosen through one of three ways: through their writing competition scores; via a combination of 70% grades and 30% writing scores; or through a supplemental method that included affirmative action.
Obama sparked a heated controversy when 27 men, but only 9 women, were selected for the Review. He blamed the result on an insufficient number of women choosing to compete for editorial slots. The arithmetic flaw with Obama’s defense was that women were 40% of the Harvard Law class, 37% of the competitors, and yet only 25% of the editors Obama selected. Under the prior president of the Review (Peter Yu), women were also 37% of the writing competitors but were 41% of selectees. Under Obama’s successor (David Ellen), 37% of the new editors were women. Therefore, among these three successive male editors of the Review (two of whom were minorities), only Obama had a dramatic underrepresentation of women editors.
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