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Yale Law Women
Provide other opportunities for professors to be observed in class and to receive feedback based on the observations. Recognize and celebrate teaching excellence (the YLW Faculty Excellence Prize is one example of a student-led initiative to do just this—the Administration should also take the lead on acknowledging superb teaching). Provide funding for faculty to take small groups of students for lunch or drinks in order to facilitate relationship-building outside the classroom. Encourage professors to attend school-wide happy hours to facilitate out-ofclassroom, informal faculty-student interaction.
Interactions Beyond the Classroom This study identified and evaluated five primary forms of out-of-class interactions between faculty and students: 1. General availability to students (office hours and other policies): 72% of professors report that they hold regular office hours; an additional 35% have open-door policies, and 74% meet with students by appointment. Women professors (86%) are much more likely than their men colleagues (50%) to hold regular office hours and to meet with students by appointment. Professors noted declining student attendance at office hours. Among students, men attended office hours an average of 3.6 times last semester, while women attended only 2.6 times on average. 2. Advocacy for students through recommendations: Among professors interviewed, women faculty wrote significantly more letters of recommendation. The 14 women interviewed reported writing 99 letters, an average of 7.1 letters per person, while the 40 men interviewed reported writing 158 letters, an average of 4.0 letters per person. Professors reported writing roughly equal numbers of clerkship recommendation letters for men and women students, but significantly more Supreme Court clerkship recommendation letters for men. 3. Collaborative work (research/teaching assistance, supervised writing, etc.): Women students account for 58% of the reported research assistants and 54% of the teaching assistants for the professors whom we interviewed. The fourteen women professors who provided numbers were especially likely to take on women teaching and research assistants, but men students account for 52% of the teaching assistants for men professors. Men begin writing earlier: broken down by gender, 41.0% of men who responded to our student survey had their first writing-based relationship in their 1L spring compared to 35.1% of women.