What’s in a Name: Gender Bias in Student Ratings

When students rate instructors, are they assessing teaching, or also whether a person meets gendered expectations of a good teacher? MacNell, Driscoll and Hunt use the possibility of separating names from actual identities in online teaching to distinguish these questions.

The same instructor under different identities

Two assistant instructors each taught online discussion groups under male and female identities. Actual and perceived gender therefore did not always coincide. The four groups provided 43 usable evaluations, allowing comparisons across ratings of professionalism, responsiveness, organization and other qualities.

Promptness offers a revealing detail: assignments returned at the same time could still receive different evaluations depending on perceived gender. The design makes “the women simply taught differently” insufficient as a general explanation. An identity conveyed through a name can change how students interpret conduct, then enter an apparently objective scale.

When universities use these scores for hiring, renewal or promotion, student expectations can become career consequences through administrative routines. Providing a channel for student feedback and treating its scores as unbiased measures of quality are separate choices.

What a small experiment can establish

This is not a representative survey of university teaching. It involves one course and two instructors, and some statistical tests use a significance threshold of .10. Not every rating dimension has equally strong support. Names conveying binary gender in an online setting also differ from classroom interactions involving age, race, accent and embodiment. The 2015 issue publication and 2014 online publication refer to the same study.

The paper suggests a practical audit: compare ratings with teaching materials, feedback and actual timing records, rather than equating scores with teaching ability. Acker’s theory of gendered organizations helps explain how an indicator becomes institutional authority. The study of disciplinary brilliance beliefs extends the question of who appears competent to a wider academic culture.