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Mental Health Reader Question

Gender Bias and Student Evaluation of Teaching

Several colleagues emailed me the Inside Higher Ed essay, “Ratings and Gender Bias Over Time.” Though many of us already appreciate the ways gender bias operate in student opinions of teaching, what this article discusses is how women faculty members are harmed over time. Reflect on this: “Our findings show that women are rated significantly lower as they age from younger to middle age, with their lowest teaching ratings emerging at age 47. Men do not experience this drop in ratings.”

As I thought about this article and what we could do at SLU to mitigate against harm, several things came to mind.

  1. We should work more closely with student government and student leaders to make students aware of how bias operates in student opinions of teaching effectiveness. I trust that our students will want to do better. They just need to be made more aware of the ways bias works in course evaluations.
  2. Though I trust our PSC looks holistically at a candidate’s tenure and promotion file, we know that student evaluations of teaching play an important role. The only way to diminish the importance of this role is to provide more valid assessments of teaching excellence and effectiveness. This means developing a better process of peer evaluation of teaching, and new measures of teaching effectiveness like focus groups. Student opinions matter and we should care to be responsive to student concerns. But we need to put more thought into other measures of good teaching.
  3. Chairs and other administrators need to be proactive about supporting women, especially as women get older. Our opinion of whether or not a woman is able to stand for promotion to full professor should not hinge on student opinions about teachers. As well, we chairs need to be intentional about how we think about our colleagues and their teaching effectiveness/excellence. Just as PSC is mindful of the bias built into student evaluations of teaching, chairs need to be mindful (maybe even more so). We chairs can attempt to understand the harm that a woman may feel when they receive negative evaluations from students, even when their teaching is improving or is highly effective. Our feedback on annual reports can be supportive, and can include various measures of teaching effectiveness. Notably, if one of our colleagues is changing their syllabi or experimenting with readings and assignments, we can note this. Most important, we can make sure that negative student opinions don’t derail our colleagues on their path to professional advancement.

More–much more–can be said on this point. A sub-committee is working on harm reduction and teaching evaluations, and their report should come out soon. But as important, department chairs need to be more intentional about supporting colleagues in the face of bias. Finally, we can educate students about bias, and we can help them do better.

Please reach out if you are interested in continuing this very important conversation.