Female Profs Want Bonus Points In Evaluations Because Of ‘Gender Bias’

Associate professor at Cornell University says women need privilege

By: Ryan Carrillo

In today’s age women have all the opportunities and freedom in the world, why then are they constantly asking for special treatment?

According to Sarah Pritchard, an associate professor at Cornell University, colleges need to “inflate” or “adjust” the teacher evaluation forms that female professors receive.

According to Campus Reform:

“I’ve read some of the research on gender bias in course evaluations, heard shocking stories from female colleagues, and, unfortunately, seen the issue in my own evaluations,” Pritchard wrote in a recent column for The Conversation— an online blog written by, and intended for, individuals in the academic and research communities.

According to Pritchard, female professors are more likely to find personal attacks and “comments that have nothing to do with their teaching abilities or competencies” embedded in students’ feedback regardless of whether they teach at the undergraduate or post-baccalaureate level.

“For instance, it’s common for female faculty to read comments about their appearance and fashion choices,” she writes.

Echoing the sentiments of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Pritchard cites a recent “gendered language” study which claims that college students are more likely to describe female instructors as “bossy,” in addition to more flattering words like “nice,” “approachable,” or “helpful.” The same study indicates that male instructors are more often characterized as “funny,” “genius,” or “brilliant.”

“[T]hese adjectives not only reflect but also reinforce gender stereotypes for both men and women… the fact is that these comments speak to the ways that female instructors are perceived differently in the classroom…” Pritchard writes.

Pritchard goes on to say that gender bias in teacher evaluations can often thwart the success of female faculty members by impeding their professional advancement.

The abstract of the study “What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching” by Lillian MacNell, Adam Driscoll, and Andrea N. Hunt that Pritchard is basing some of her claims on says that:

“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.

As a remedy, Pritchard believes that administrators should review female faculty using data that has been “adjusted” in favor of the women.

“Female faculty should receive an automatic correction—that is to say, a bonus—on their quantitative teaching evaluation scores,” Pritchard writes, adding that these bonuses “should be determined by average gender bias in teaching evaluations at their institution or national averages.”

However, the study Pritchard refers to has been met with much criticism.

The critique, “What’s in the Study: Exposing Validity Threats In the MacNell, Driscoll, and Hunt Study of Gender Bias” comes from Steve Benton and Dan Li who highlighted several problems with the study’s methodology, “Although MacNell et al. (2014) believe their research demonstrates gender bias, a closer look at the study’s design and analysis reveals much to refute about that assertion.”

Benton and Li’s paper says:

In the study, students (N = 72) enrolled in an introductory-level five-week summer anthropology/sociology course were randomly assigned to six discussion sections. The course was taught entirely online. The professor took two sections and assigned two each to two instructors who moderated discussion boards and graded assignments. For one section each the instructors falsely identified their gender, thereby creating “actual gender” and “perceived gender” sections. Toward the end of the semester 90% of students responded to a 15-item online “course evaluation.” The researchers found no “significant” differences in student ratings between actual female and actual male sections; however, the ratings of the “perceived male” section were significantly higher (p < .05) than the “perceived female” section on fairness, praise, and promptness.

Here are our chief concerns about the study:

•  Researcher expectancy effects. Researcher expectancy effects can occur when those carrying out a study know what is expected. MacNell et al. report that, “All instructors were aware of the study and cooperated fully.” So, in other words the instructors knew that in one section they were identified as a person of the opposite gender. The authors should have employed a double-blind procedure so that neither instructor would have known which section was the “perceived gender.”

As Krathwohl (1993) points out, “Researchers or their assistants may inadvertently tip the scales in favor of an experimental treatment in a variety of ways…for example with encouragement and clues” (p. 468). Notably, two of the three items that were significantly different between the perceived female and male sections were associated with encouragement (i.e., praise) and objectivity (i.e., fairness), which could have been subject to inadvertent expectancy effects, because the instructors might have responded differently on the discussion boards across their two sections. Given the complexity in the online interaction with individual students, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the instructors to “maintain consistency in teaching style” (p. 6). Although the authors apparently want us to assume the instructors behaved exactly the same way in each section they taught—the one for their actual gender and the one for their perceived gender—they provide no information about what actually occurred in those course sections. They could have performed a content analysis of the discussion boards, but they did not.

Related to this issue is the fact that the participating students were enrolled in an anthropology/sociology course. Was gender bias a topic in the course? Did the instructors inadvertently express views about gender bias?

The paper goes on to critique the sample size saying they were much too small for sophisticated analysis. The uneven class sizes in the study was also a problem, with 72 students each class should have been 12 students but the one class with the “perceived female” instructor only had 8 students.

Benton and Li say “For such a small sample, such a difference in attrition may have had some noticeable influence on the ratings of instructors. Unfortunately, the authors did not provide any explanations for the variations in class size.” They also criticize that the genders of the students were not reported on either saying that recent research suggests that student gender may have a significant effect on the ratings of male and female teachers.

The paper goes on to list many other problems with the study, and I encourage all readers to take a look at the both studies themselves but Benton and Li conclude that,

the MacNell et al. study falls short of other studies investigating gender and student ratings. Centra and Gaubatz (2000), for example, analyzed student ratings of instruction from 741 classes in 2- and 4-year institutions across multiple disciplines. They found a significant but nonmeaningful student-gender by instructor-gender interaction: female students, and sometimes male students, gave slightly higher ratings to female instructors. Centra (2009) also found that female instructors received slightly higher average ratings.

In a review of 14 experimental studies, Feldman (1992) found few gender differences (in only two of the studies) in global ratings. In a follow-up study Feldman (1993) found a very weak average correlation between instructor gender and student ratings (r = .02). In reviewing the experimental studies he wrote, “Any predispositions of students in the social laboratory to view male and female college teachers in certain ways (or the lack of such predispositions) may be modified by students’ actual experiences with their teachers in the classroom or lecture hall” (Feldman, 1992, p. 152).

And, in point of fact, no differences in ratings were found in the MacNell et al. (2014) study between sections that were taught by the actual female instructor and the actual male instructor.

It appears that Pritchard’s concerns are not based in reality and in fact another study conducted by her institution, Cornell University, reported that faculty prefer women for Tenure-Track STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) positions and are twice as likely as identical male candidates to be hired.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a former professor at Clark University, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Youtube star, The Factual Feminist, said that awarding “brownie points” to professors because of their gender is both “humiliating and patronizing.”

Sommers told Campus Reform that “If we are going to implement a bonus system like this, then why not start with little boys who face gender bias from the moment they enter school? That could help level the college playing field–where women outnumber men by large numbers.”

I couldn’t agree more. So which is it ladies, are you strong independent women that can succeed on your own, or do you need “brownie points” and special treatment from men?