A recent study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that students are more likely to have a negative bias toward female professors when completing course evaluations.

The study said gender biases, which varied based on factors including discipline and student gender, could affect objective practices like how quickly assignments were graded.

The biases could be large enough to cause effective instructors to receive lower evaluations than professors who, by other measures, were proven to be less effective, according to Inside Higher Ed.

“The truth is we systematically see women get lower grades, lower evaluations, lower ratings, and a lot of the research demonstrates that there are characteristics that are considered positive in men and considered negative in women,” said Charisse L’Pree, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University.

L’Pree said the way to eliminate bias is to remove any reference to gender when it comes to child development. Even in the spectrum of expertise, being an expert in a field is coded as masculine.

Libby Barlow, assistant vice president for institutional research and assessment at SU, said her office does not do any kind of analysis on evaluations for two reasons.

The first, she said, is that the evaluations are done as a service to departments, and each department owns their data, adding that the data is then theirs to analyze and interpret. The second reason is that evaluation questions vary across departments and sometimes even within departments.

“There is no question that shows up on all evaluation forms, which means a responsible analysis of systemic bias would be pretty hard,” Barlow said.

Before coming to SU, Barlow said she spent time thinking about the bias question, and concluded that any apparent bias more likely reflects characteristics of the respondents themselves, not characteristics of the evaluation form.

She said if bias was found, reconfiguring the evaluation questions would not be her first step in trying to fix it.

The authors of the study performed advanced statistical analyses of five years worth of data. They analyzed 23,001 evaluations of 379 instructors completed by 4,423 students in six mandatory first-year classes at a French university, according to Inside Higher Ed.

The French data set, according to Inside Higher Ed, measured teaching effectiveness by student performance on an anonymously graded final, which found no significant difference between the effectiveness between female and male teachers. The United States’ data set did not measure teaching effectiveness.

The group also applied and tested the evaluations of four sections of an online course in the U.S. in which there was a male and a female instructor who switched their identities. The female professor used a male name while the male professor used a female name. The class was online, so students never saw or heard their instructor, according to Inside Higher Ed.

In both the U.S. and French data there was statistically a significant difference between the rating of female and male instructors, with the perceived male instructors getting considerably higher average ratings, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Published on February 14, 2016 at 10:50 pm

Contact Stacy: sfern100@syr.edu | @StacyFernandezB