By Roberta Attanasio, IEAM Blog Editor
Back in 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) acknowledged that female professors suffered from pervasive, albeit unintentional, discrimination. Charles M. Vest, MIT President at the time, said in the : “I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.” The statement introduced an accompanying study unveiling the MIT pattern of discrimination — or, under a more current perspective, gender bias.
Gender discrimination and gender bias are not the same. Gender bias is subtle and more deeply embedded in cultural norms — indeed, the pattern documented by the MIT study was subtle, while at the same time consistent and demoralizing.
From Wikimedia Commons
Since then, MIT has been recognized as a national model for addressing gender bias, a multifaceted issue that sometimes pops up with new actors all around the academic world. Most academic institutions have followed suit. Although some major issues have been or are being addressed, there are many more that still require considerable work, as for example the problematic access to top-level positions.
However, gender bias is more pervasive than we think — it can’t be addressed by simply changing practices and procedures within the institution. It involves not only faculty and administrators, but also students. Students have an often unrecognized role in how gender bias plays out in colleges and universities, and sometimes this role resides in the realm of their perception. Vest’s words “contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception” still ring true.
Let’s explore a case in point with these new actors — the students. In the academic world, it has often been thought that the student evaluations of their instructors are unintentionally influenced by the instructors’ gender. The bias is thought to be against female instructors. So, there is a lingering question: is gender bias in student evaluations reality or perception?
Unfortunately, it is looking more like it is a reality. Results from a new study () show that college students rating of their instructors’ teaching ability is biased — as expected, the bias is against female instructors. For the study, Lillian MacNell, along with her collaborators Adam Driscoll and Andrea Hunt, devised a strategy for blinding students to the actual gender of their instructors — they used an online teaching environment.
Instructors of a course at North Carolina State University taught using two different gender identities. Because of the online format, the students never saw or heard the instructors. At the end of the course, students were asked to rate their instructors on 12 different traits, covering characteristics related to their effectiveness and interpersonal skills. Students rated the instructors they believed to be male significantly higher than the instructors they believed to be female, regardless of their actual gender.
One example relates to the rating of the promptness by which instructors returned graded classwork to the students. MacNell said in a : “Classwork was graded and returned to students at the same time by both instructors. But the instructor students thought was male was given a 4.35 rating out of 5. The instructor students thought was female got a 3.55 rating.”
Student instructor ratings are used to guide decisions related to hiring, promotions, and tenure. On a five-point scale, a decrease from 4.35 to 3.55 is significant. If these types of results are confirmed by future studies, it might mean that student ratings are inherently biased against women. The possibility that such a bias influences women’s advancement in academic institution requires careful consideration.
Gender bias doesn’t run along a few expected trajectories — it’s, instead, holographic. Much has been said about gender bias in teachers, but little about bias in students. The current tenet in academia and other establishments is that raising awareness will solve bias problems. However, as pointed out by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg in the a few days ago, research shows that raising awareness can backfire, leading to discriminate more, rather than less. They conclude that “If we don’t reinforce that people need — and want — to overcome their biases, we end up silently condoning the status quo.”
As a student and employee at a state university I can agree that gender bias is prevalent in academia. In many cultures throughout the world, both primitive and new world, women have been designated as societal caregivers. This is a stereotype that has been deeply embedded in most civilizations. The real problem is that gender bias is not easy to identify, but yet it is always existent! Human nature is complicated and delicate making it hard to determine the true intent of one’s choices, however statistics show that gender bias is prevalent. For example, an conducted by a group at the University of Pennsylvania examined the effects of bias against women, as well as minorities, when expressing interest in doctoral programs. Interestingly, they discovered that faculty were more likely to respond to e-mails that were sent by students with names identified as those typical of white males compared to names identified with women or minorities. For all intents and purposes, the e-mails were fictitious and the content was identical, the only difference was the name of the sender. This goes to show that gender bias in academia is a universal problem, affecting faculty and students, but just like any experimental design there are many limitations that could discredit the findings as concrete data. It is sometimes hard to convince people that something exist without irrefutable data.
I’ve personally listened in on conversations and have heard people say the only kind of woman that belongs in science is the kind without children. I believe that bearing children is intimidating, to both men and women, and somehow the capability of such event makes a woman more of a liability than a man. Just like any other form of discrimination the only way to combat the problem is to bring awareness and education to the issue at hand. Yes, it will cause civil dispute and become a civil rights issue, but the first step to solving a problem is identifying the problem.
I 100% can relate to this article and I actually have experienced and witnessed this bias myself. I have had the privilege of teaching at the college level for the past 4 years. For most of the time I taught my own laboratory class as a TA, working under both male and female lecture (PhD) professors. The general feedback from my students, regarding their lecture professors, has mainly been respectful for the males and about 99% of the time their feedback for female lecture professors has been starkly different. Female professors are given the “bad rap” of being too pushy, just wanting to hear themselves speak, moody, and showing “favoritism”. It always seems that there is somewhat of a “fear” when it comes to male teachers – as if it is more important to please males rather than females. This could be attached to student’s own interpretations of their relationships with both their mother and father. With that being said, there is a possible correlation with socioeconomic status (SES) and how many parents (1 or 2; heterosexual or homosexual parental couples) were present during the “at home” period in which the students were raised, where personal standards of practice regarding gender-treatment are set into personal and moral foundations. Does this gender-based treatment stem from the environment in which they were raised? Does media exposure of varying types ingrain ideas of how we as a society are to act in social situations? Based on SES, what type of media did these students have access to and is there a difference on gender treatment in those coming from a higher or lower SES-themed home?
Fascinating subject. The findings are not surprising, just looking around in classrooms with a good observational attitude will make you see that what these scientists found is very similar to the impression we get about the student/teacher relationships. This is a reflection, in the classroom, of what happens routinely in our daily life. The point is, careful research gives more credibility to our own observations. But what can be done to change these perceptions? Should be looking to see if gender influences the professors’ perception of the students. This is a very important subject, and should be evaluated under all different points of view.