Does professors' gender impact how students evaluate their teaching and the recommendations for the best professor?

Arturo Arrona-Palacios; Kingsley Okoye; Claudia Camacho-Zuñiga; Nisrine Hammout; Emilia Luttmann-Nakamura; Samira Hosseini; Jose Escamilla

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e05313

Does professors' gender impact how students evaluate their teaching and the recommendations for the best professor?

Heliyon. 2020 Oct 21;6(10):e05313. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e05313. eCollection 2020 Oct.

Authors

Arturo Arrona-Palacios¹, Kingsley Okoye¹, Claudia Camacho-Zuñiga², Nisrine Hammout³, Emilia Luttmann-Nakamura⁴, Samira Hosseini^{1

5}, Jose Escamilla⁶

Affiliations

¹ Writing Lab, TecLabs, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico.
² School of Enginnering and Sciences, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Toluca Campus, Mexico.
³ Emines- School of Industrial Management, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Benguerir, Morocco.
⁴ Institutional Effectiveness Department, North Region ECOA, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico.
⁵ School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey Campus, Mexico.
⁶ TecLabs, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico.

Abstract

This study examined the impact of the professors' gender according to a student evaluation of teaching (SET) in a private university. The study took place in a private university (n = 103,833) on six different campuses in the north region of Mexico. The distribution of the professors' gender was analyzed according to semesters, campuses, and schools. Our findings suggested that when undergraduates evaluated their professors on specific criteria concerning teaching performance, they expressed their opinion regardless of the professors' gender. However, when being asked for a single overall evaluation, as whether they would recommend the professor as one of their best professors, the students tended to favor male professors over their female peers by a slight margin. While such perceptions might not be representative of the actual teaching quality, it would be interesting in the future to delve deeper into the causes of possible biases.

Keywords: Education; Educational innovation; Gender bias; Higher education; Performance evaluation; Student evaluation of teaching.