Gender in the Classroom: The Influence of a Professor's Gender on a Student's Impression and Lecture Evaluation

• In Event: A Microscope for Lessons: Learning From the DARMA (Dual Axis Rating and Media Annotation) Method for Continuous Evaluation of Educational Experience

Abstract

Gender biases are pervasive. There is ample evidence that students respond to instructor gender in a way that disadvantages female faculty. In an online course where gender could be manipulated, MacNell, Driscoll and Hunt (2014) found that “female” instructors received lower evaluations than did instructors presented as male.
These differences have implications for efforts to diversify universities, as well as for helping students to learn from a diverse set of instructors. Thus it is a phenomenon worth exploring, even as we regret that it exists. If we can understand better how students experience instruction from different faculty, we can begin to understand the sources of these biases and identify ways to eliminate them. No single study will answer this question, but we will begin by exploring whether these biases exist in continuous evaluation of existing courses.
The present study is exploratory, looking at whether these biases emerge when students watch Coursera lectures with male and female instructors. We used the DARMA method (Girard & Wright, 2017) to collect continuous ratings along two dimensions, how interesting the lecture was, and how positively or negatively the students rated the instructor.
A total of 88 undergraduate students (58 females, 30 males) from the introductory psychology subject pool of a large Midwestern university took part. We selected Coursera videos on four different topics given by male and female faculty; experts evaluated the videos as comparable in quality. Each participant watched two videotaped lectures on the same broad topic given by a male and female professor, with order randomized for each participant. At the end of each video students also filled out a course evaluation for the instructor.
Figure 1 shows the DARMA results for each pair of lectures, with male instructors on the left and females on the right. Students showed significantly higher ratings of the male faculty in each pair of videos, and significantly higher interest ratings for the male-given lectures for all topics except for the Obesity lecture (which did not reach significance but differed in the same direction). The same pattern emerged for the traditional evaluations.
We are currently looking at points in the video where deflections occurred – where there were notable changes in evaluation, as a way of beginning to identify the instructional moves that affect student responses. Many of these have some gendered connotations, e.g., sharing personal information or expressing uncertainty.
Implicit biases such as the one shown here are difficult to engage with and ameliorate. We hope that the DARMA approach may provide a way to identify some of the processes that underlie this bias. At best it may ultimately result in identifying ways that faculty can reduce these effects. At the least, though, we hope it will help to bring the existence of such biases to the awareness of faculty and researchers so that they can take them into account when interpreting course evaluations.

Authors

• Snehanjani Edupuganti

• Kevin F. Miller, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor