Graphic of the Day (From The Economist):
Conclusion: Economics professors are horribly brilliant (or is it brilliantly horrible?)
My experience is that students either love or hate economics. The middle is very small. So the contrast here doesn't surprise me.
But I think there is a more important, and troubling, conclusion to draw from this: Female professors are universally more horrible and less brilliant than male professors. It is time to recognize the reality and ban females from the classroom. We need to stop this unjust and unfair treatment of students and reform our education system to ensure our students are getting the education they deserve, from the professors best equipped to teach them. The male professors.
This ends a public service message from Donald Trump.
Of course I am being facetious. Students rate female professors lower independent of the quality of teaching. Why? Well...I don't know why. But there is evidence that this is the case.
A faculty member in our department (who happens to be female), forwarded me this article from NPR last week. The conclusion is stark:
A new study argues that student evaluations are systematically biased against women — so much so, in fact, that they're better mirrors of gender bias than of what they are supposed to be measuring: teaching quality.
The evidence?
In this paper, the team ran a series of statistical tests on two different data sets, of French and U.S. university students.
The French students were, in effect, randomly assigned to either male or female section leaders in a wide range of required courses. In this case, the study authors found, male French students rated male instructors more highly across the board.
Is it bias? Or were the male instructors, maybe, actually, on average, better teachers? (It's science; we have to ask the uncomfortable questions.)
Well, turns out that, at this university, all students across all sections of a course take the same, anonymously graded final exam, regardless of which instructor they have.
This offers the chance to look at one dimension of actual instructor quality: Presumably better section leaders would help students get better grades on the same exam. In fact, they found, the students of male instructors on average did slightly worse on the final.
Overall, there was no correlation between students rating their instructors more highly and those students actually learning more.
The American case was a little bit different. Here, the authors performed a new analysis of a clever experiment published in 2014. Students were taking a single online class with either a male or female instructor. In half the cases, the instructors agreed to dress in virtual drag: The men used the women's names and vice versa.
Here, it was the female students, not the males, who rated the instructors they believed to be male more highly across the board. That's right: The same instructor, with all the same comments, all the same interactions with the class, received higher ratings if he was called Paul than if she was called Paula.
And that higher rating even applied to a seemingly objective question: Did this teacher return assignments on time? (The online system made it possible to ensure that promptness was identical in every case.)
Conclusions:
- French male students and American female students like male professors.
- Student evaluations of teaching quality suck. But I don't know of a better alternative. In evaluating faculty teaching, I use student evaluations to identify trends and possibly identify outliers, and nothing else.
- Gender bias is real. It is troubling. And embarrassing.
I'm the proud father of two smart, kind, athletic daughters (and a son, but he's a different story...I'm kidding!). Both of my daughters excel in math and science. My wife and I have both preached to our daughters that their gender doesn't matter. If they like doing something, do it, and they will be rewarded for it.
I fear I am lying to my daughters.
And that makes me sad.
