Race and gender biases in student evaluations of teachers

Carolyn Chisadza, Nicky Nicholls and Eleni Yitbarek ()

Economics Letters, 2019, vol. 179, issue C, 66-71

Abstract: Student ratings of teaching (SETs) are vital for academic career trajectories of higher education lecturers. Although student bias against female lecturers is noted in previous studies, mostly in the developed world, the extent to which race affects such ratings has received limited attention. To better understand the role of race and gender bias in SETs, we conduct an experiment in South Africa, where racial bias is highly prevalent. Students are randomly assigned to follow video lectures with identical narrated slides and script but given by lecturers of different race and gender. We find that black lecturers receive lower ratings than white lecturers, particularly from black students.

Keywords: Student evaluations of teaching; Gender and race bias; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J15 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176519301016
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:179:y:2019:i:c:p:66-71

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2019.03.022

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().