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What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching

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Abstract

Student ratings of teaching play a significant role in career outcomes for higher education instructors. Although instructor gender has been shown to play an important role in influencing student ratings, the extent and nature of that role remains contested. While difficult to separate gender from teaching practices in person, it is possible to disguise an instructor’s gender identity online. In our experiment, assistant instructors in an online class each operated under two different gender identities. Students rated the male identity significantly higher than the female identity, regardless of the instructor’s actual gender, demonstrating gender bias. Given the vital role that student ratings play in academic career trajectories, this finding warrants considerable attention.

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Figure 1

Notes

  1. To clarify the language we use throughout the paper, we refer to all three persons responsible for grading and directly interacting with students as “instructors.” The course “professor” was the person responsible for course design and content preparation, while the two “assistant instructors” worked under the professor’s direction to manage and teach their respective discussion groups.

  2. A one-way ANOVA test confirmed that there was no significant variation among all six groups’ discussion board grades and overall grades for the course.

  3. We acknowledge that the application of parametric analytical techniques (ANOVA, MANOVA, and t-tests) to ordinal data (the Likert scale responses) remains controversial among social scientists and statisticians. (See Knapp (1990) for a relatively balanced review of the debate.) We side with the arguments of Gaito (1980) and Armstrong (1981) and argue that it is appropriate to do so in our case as the concept being measured is interval, even if the data labels are not. This practice is common within higher education research. (e.g. Centra & Gaubatz [2000] Young, Rush, & Shaw [2009]; Basow [1995]; and Knol et al. [2013])

  4. While we acknowledge that a significance level of .05 is conventional in social science and higher education research, we side with Skipper, Guenther, and Nass (1967), Labovitz (1968), and Lai (1973) in pointing out the arbitrary nature of conventional significance levels. Considering our study design, we have used a significance level of .10 for some tests where: 1) the results support the hypothesis and we are consequently more willing to reject the null hypothesis of no difference; 2) our hypothesis is strongly supported theoretically and by empirical results in other studies that use lower significance levels; 3) our small n may be obscuring large differences; and 4) the gravity of an increased risk of Type I error is diminished in light of the benefit of decreasing the risk of a Type II error (Labovitz, 1968; Lai, 1973).

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Correspondence to Lillian MacNell.

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MacNell, L., Driscoll, A. & Hunt, A.N. What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching. Innov High Educ 40, 291–303 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-014-9313-4

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