III. Methodology
1. Faculty Interviews Yale Law Women Speak Up Study Board Members invited faculty members to participate in one-on-one sessions with student interviewers, which generally lasted 45 minutes to one hour. This report reflects findings from 54 interviews completed between December 2011 and February 2012. Yale Law Women Speak Up Study Board Members sent requests for interviews to all professors who were in New Haven (even if they were on leave) during the 2012 spring semester. Professors who were in their first semester of teaching at Yale Law School did not receive invitations. Because professors chose to participate in the interview process, self-selection bias may be present. Out of the 83 professors contacted with an interview request, 54 professors participated. Volunteers did not record the interviews anonymously but kept all interview information confidential. Quotations included in this publication are not attributed to individual professors. The ways in which the comments appear in this report reflect each interviewer’s note-taking style. The questions that guided the interviews, along with the instructions given to student interviewers, are attached in Appendix B. This report does not imply unanimity of opinion among faculty respondents. Trends and recommendations have been identified based on themes that emerge across many, but not all, interviews. We have made an effort to tally information from faculty members on their student supervision, research assistants, teaching assistants, recommendation letters, and references. However, not every professor provided exact numbers to the interviewer. The numbers provide information about a subset of the professors at Yale Law School, but they do not offer the complete picture. 2. Classroom Monitoring Over three one-week periods in September, October, and November 2011, we monitored 113 class sessions for 21 law school courses. We monitored seven classes with peak attendance over 25, six classes with attendance under 25, three 1L small group classes, and five first-semester 1L classes.