How Gender Influences Student Feedback on Professors?

Despite witnessing a significant jump in school teachers in 2022-23 and 2023-24, from 51.3 per cent to 53.3 per cent in favour of women (according to 2023-24 UDISE+ data) in India, a starkly different picture emerges within universities. All India Survey on Higher Education data reveals that women constitute only 37.8 per cent of university faculty, with substantial underrepresentation at higher ranks: for every 100 male Assistant Professors, there are 76 females; this ratio drops to 60 for Associate Professors and 40 for full Professors. This underrepresentation of women in academia is a well-documented global trend.

One potential factor contributing to this imbalance is gender bias embedded within student evaluations of teaching (SETs), a standard metric for assessing teaching effectiveness.  Research suggests these evaluations often unfairly disadvantage female instructors, potentially leading them to dedicate more time to teaching and less to research, a detrimental trade-off for career advancement and tenure.

Professor Moumita Roy from the Amrut Mody School of Management​​​​, Ahmedabad University and Professor Puneet Arora from the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon investigated the issue within the Indian university context. Their innovative study manipulated the perceived gender of the instructor and the provision of instructor credentials by allowing students to evaluate an identical audio-visual lecture on foundational microeconomics. Students from the BA (Hons) programme​​​​​ of Ahmedabad University Stuti Iyer, Diya Patel, Shreya Talwar, and alumna Harshita Shah, assisted in conducting the validation test of the audio-visual lecture.

The study initially revealed no gender bias in SETs when only the instructor's voice was altered. However, the findings shifted when professor credentials were introduced. The results indicated that additional information about professors had a gendered impact on student evaluations. Female professors received higher SET scores when their accomplishments were highlighted, while male professors, particularly when evaluated by female students, received lower scores.

Professors Roy and Arora suggest that these points towards an "in-group bias" among female students, who may rate perceived-female professors more favourably once the information gap about their accomplishments is reduced. This finding aligns with economic theories explaining gender bias in SETs, such as statistical discrimination theory (where limited information leads to gender-based stereotypes) and role model theory (where students favour instructors they identify with, potentially creating internal conflict for female students navigating stereotypes).

These findings raise serious concerns about the reliability of SETs as objective indicators of teaching performance, highlighting their inclination to gendered perception effects. The study recommends caution when using SETs for performance reviews, as they may reflect underlying biases rather than teaching quality.

This research, which also involved undergraduate students through Ahmedabad University's unique Undergraduate Research Programme (UGRP)​​​​​​, provided valuable training in research methodologies and nuances. Stuti Iyer, a psychology student, described the experience as “enriching," highlighting the hands-on exposure to coordination, data collection, and literature review, which significantly shaped her academic interests and future graduate studies in behavioural science. Harshita Shah recounted her captivation with the "why” behind human decisions during Professor Roy's course, leading her to actively participate in the project as an experimenter, involved in participant verification, maintaining experimental integrity, data collection, confidentiality, logistics, and problem-solving.

Diya Patel, an economics student, found an avenue to contribute meaningfully to this significant project. Diya reckons how this distinctive facet of the University's learning paradigm provided her with direct, hands-on research experience, whether through independent exploration of a chosen topic under faculty guidance or by actively assisting with ongoing faculty-led research endeavours. This equipped her with valuable skills and robust preparation for future research-oriented roles and advanced graduate studies.

The research has been published in Elsevier’s Journal of Development Economics. The complete study can be accessed here.