Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluations

Abstract

*This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students' grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor's gender, we find that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues. This bias is driven by male students' evaluations, is larger for mathematical courses and particularly pronounced for junior women. The gender bias in teaching evaluations we document may have direct as well as indirect effects on the career progression of women by affecting junior women's confidence and through the reallocation of instructor resources away from research and towards teaching. JEL Classification:J16, J71, I23, J45

Gender bias in student evaluation of teaching among undergraduate business students

“…Interacting gender with experience did not have significant effects, but there are indications that women are able to make up for some of the gender bias through experience, at least initially. This rhymes with the results of Mengel et al (2017) who found that the gender bias in SET is particularly pronounced for junior women, but less so for senior female faculty.…”

“…They also value female instructors' teaching performance less than male instructors' as well as finding female instructors less accessible. These results are in line with Boring (2015), where she found that being a female teacher decreased the likelihood of obtaining a higher satisfaction score, Mengel et al (2017) who find that women get systematically lower scores than men, and MacNell et al (2015) who found that students made more demands on perceived female instructors than perceived male instructors. Although the simple model, Model 1, showed women receiving consistently lower SET than men, the size of the effect was much larger in Model 2, when the gender effect was also interacted with the independent variables experience, co-teaching, part-time instructor, and class size.…”

“…The gender bias against junior women was not only found in questions on the individual instructor, but also on questions meant to evaluate learning materials, such as textbooks and online learning platform. Mengel et al (2017) also found that study hours, current or future grades were not affected by the gender of the instructor. Blackhart, Peruche, DeWall, and Joiner (2006), in a study including 167 courses in psychology over two semesters in 2003 and 2004, found no significant effects of gender on SET.…”

“…In their paper, Mengel et al (2017) also found that female instructors received systematically lower student evaluations of teaching than male instructors. They used a data set of almost 20,000 observations from students in the academic years 2009-2010 and 2012-2013. They found that the results were dependent on whether the instructor was a junior instructor, as there was no gender bias for professors.…”

“…Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is a common method to evaluate teaching (Becker & Watts, 1999;Clayson, 2009;Stark & Freishtat, 2014;Mengel, Sauermann & Zölitz, 2017). The attractiveness of student evaluation of teaching is that the measurement is easy and takes little time to administer, and being numerical, the ratings have an air of objectivity.…”