Are female teachers discriminated against in course evaluations?

Course evaluations play an important role in the university ecosystem: they show how courses can be developed and improved based on students’ experiences, but they are also used as part of the merit assessment when teachers apply for academic positions. It is therefore problematic that international research shows that female teachers systematically receive lower ratings than their male colleagues, suggesting that the evaluation system may be discriminatory.

– Research shows that women can be discriminated against in higher education due to gender-based prejudice. For example, there are perceptions that teachers should be men, or that men are better suited for certain subjects. This is particularly evident in economics, where men are overrepresented among faculty. Since course evaluations are used in recruitment processes, it becomes problematic if women are assessed based on their gender rather than their performance, says Ola Andersson, one of the researchers behind the study.

When distance learning was introduced at the Department of Economics in connection with the outbreak of the pandemic, mentoring sessions, where students could meet with a mentor to get help with assignments, were replaced with a shared email address to which students could send their questions. After one semester, it became clear that students appreciated this email function, and this was when the idea for the study began to take shape.

The researchers Ola Andersson, Malin Heintz, Niklas Bengtsson, and Per Engström, all working at the Department of Economics at the time, saw an opportunity to investigate how economics students evaluated feedback from male and female teachers. What would happen if email responses were randomly signed with either a male or a female name? And could they take it a step further by ensuring that the teachers themselves were unaware of which name their emails were signed with?

– Our former course administrator, Julia Strandberg, took responsibility for the email inbox. She received all emails from students and forwarded them to one of the two mentors. The mentors then sent their replies back to Julia, who signed the email with either Elin or Anton before sending it to the student, explains Niklas Bengtsson.

The inbox became popular. In total, 765 emails were answered over two semesters, sent from 203 unique student email addresses. This corresponded to approximately 42 percent of all enrolled students. Of those who emailed questions, 116 were women and 87 were men. However, it was evident from the emails that many students studied in groups and formulated their questions together, so the actual reach was likely greater.

The results show no evidence of bias against the female mentor. In fact, “Elin” and “Anton” received nearly identical scores in the course evaluations. Nor were any differences observed when controlling for whether female students preferred the female mentor or whether the female mentor received more follow-up questions.

– The results are very encouraging, as they suggest that women are not discriminated against in course evaluations. Instead, these evaluations appear to function as a measure of teaching performance. However, it is important to remember that Sweden is a highly egalitarian society compared to the United States, where previous studies were conducted. Moreover, there is evidence that women in academia face disadvantages in other contexts, such as publishing, grant allocation, promotion, and so on, explains Malin Heintz.