Student Ratings of Teaching by Instructor Gender and Perceived Gender

Student ratings of teaching play an important role in decisions about
hiring, tenure, and compensation for instructors in higher education. In
face-to-face classrooms, researchers are limited in their ability to test
for the existence of bias in such ratings, as it is difficult to mask or
misrepresent the gender of an instructor in the classroom. However, in the
online environment is it possible to disguise an instructor’s gender
identity, and therefore isolate the effects of gender bias independent of
instructor performance. These data were collected during a controlled
pseudo-experiment in which a male and female assistant instructor helped
teach an online class, each under both male and female identities.
Students were asked to rate their instructors on 12 measures, and overall.
Data include the group to which students were assigned, their responses to
the evaluation, and demographic information including their gender and
birth year. The data also include course grades for each group.