Do students prefer male or female teachers?

New Study Shows That Students Overwhelmingly Prefer Male Professors to Female Ones. But does having a male teacher mean a higher GPA? There's a reason why Ezra Fitz is so well-liked by his students — even though he's a pretty awful teacher, when you think about it.

teenvogue.com - Students Overwhelmingly Prefer Male Professors - Teen Vogue

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There’s a reason why Ezra Fitz is so well-liked by his students — even though he’s a pretty awful teacher, when you think about it. It could be because he’s attractive, but according to a new study, it’s probably just because he’s male. Economist Anne Boring of Sciences Po, a university in Paris, teamed up with Kellie Ottoboni and Philip Stark at the University of California, Berkeley to figure out if there were any gender biases in Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET), after discovering that male students were rating male instructors higher than females ones on evaluations at her school. She then decided to transplant her theory of "double standards" in these evaluations, and the results in both field studies show glaring examples of gender biases pervading higher education. In France, where Boring found male students routinely rated their male teachers more favorably, an anonymously graded exam capped out the students’ semesters, and there was no significant difference between the grades of the students taught by men and the students taught by women. In fact, NPR reports that "the students of male instructors on average did slightly worse on the final." This means that male students’ belief that they're learning more from male teachers is a perception issue. In the U.S., they found that female students preferred male teachers, routinely rating them higher across the board. According to NPR, “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.” The results were depressing as female students who thought their female professor was male rated her higher than the ones who thought she was female. On the other hand, the female students who thought their male teacher was female rated him lower than the ones who thought he was male, again proving that that the perception that male professors are better than female ones is nothing more than a preconceived, and incorrect, notion. The study claims that teaching evaluations measure student satisfaction more than actual teaching effectiveness, and disadvantage female teachers. The authors are concerned that the scores will used by academic institutions to make hiring decisions. Hopefully, the findings in these studies will prove that SETs shouldn't be taken at face value. If there’s anything we need in higher education, it’s more diversity, not less.

Related: This New Study Says Pretty Girls Get Better Grades in School

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Why do girls do better in school than boys?

mytutor.co.uk - Outline 3 reasons why girls tend to achieve more highly than boys in ...

Girls may achieve better due to having more positive role models in schools, 86% of teachers in primary schools are female, so from a young age, girls see that they can achieve highly, subsequently giving them goals and ambition, which may make them want to achieve well at school. Girls also naturally favour coursework, as they pay more attention to detail, take care of how their work is presented and are better at meeting deadlines, Goard found that the gender gap in achievement increased significantly once GCSEs (which involved coursework) were introduced. Girls also tend to achieve more highly than boys as they are often favoured by the teachers, as they are more cooperative and typically work silently with little fuss, these positive labels given to girls may form self-fulfilling prophecies, similarly when teachers label boys as a nuisance, it can form a negative self-fulfilling prophecy for them.