Attitudes to gender roles can set scores they award individuals

Katharine Gelber and colleagues looked at the comments in four years of Uni Queensland student evaluations of teaching for a new paper in the Australian Journal of Political Science.

what they found: Students assess teaching according to gender-based contexts. Expectations of women are, “being approachable, giving time, providing feedback, listening, and doing so out of class hours” while men are judged on being, “expert, knowledgeable, funny, enthusiastic, and passionate.”

why this matters: “If the expectations on the part of students from male-identified and female-identified teachers are different, and some types of teaching behaviour are rewarded for male-identified teachers and critiqued for female-identified teachers, and vice versa, this may result in SETs not functioning to measure only the quality of teaching, but also to reinforce gender-stereotypical behaviour in teaching,” write Professor Gelber and Katie Brennan (Uni Queensland), David Duriesmith (Uni Sheffield) and Ellyse Fenton (independent researcher).

what it leads to: “Institutions that rely on SETs are rewarding female and male staff for behaviours that conform to gendered stereotypes, and that are likely to have differentiated impacts on the amount of time and energy available for research activities. This suggests that it is incorrect to regard SETs as purely a measure to assess the quality of teaching performance.”

the take-out: “Qualitative analysis can reveal gender bias that is invisible in quantitative analysis.”