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Diversity and Economic Education

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)

Hilton Riverside, Grand Salon C Sec 15
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Patrick Button, Tulane University and NBER

She is Great but not Perfect: Gender Gap in Online Ratings of College Professors

Perihan Saygin
,
University of Florida
Xi Zhang
,
University of Florida

Abstract

Gender stereotypes in teaching evaluations are well-documented. The magnitude of these biases may depend on how the evaluations are conducted in two ways, first, depending on whether evaluations are numerical or text based, and second, whether they are on an online rating website or official evaluations conducted by universities. In this paper, we first compare the gender gap in numerical ratings on an online platform (RateMyProfessor.com-RMP) in quality ratings controlling for the sentiments in comments using text analysis, and we then compare the gender differences to those in official teaching evaluations at a large public university. Our results show that there are significant gender differences in numerical ratings of quality in RMP while the official evaluations do not show such systematic gender differences. We find that women are rated with lower numerical scores on RMP even conditional on text sentiment scores and all features in their review such as difficulty rating and whether they would take the same prof again. Moreover, female professors are less(more) likely to receive the highest (lowest) numerical rating conditional on sentiment scores of the texts. Among reviews that are rated with the highest quality rating, female professors’ reviews are more likely to receive a ”thumbs down” from others, while they are more likely to receive thumbs up among the reviews with the lowest ratings. Lastly, we merge the RMP reviews to official evaluations of same professors from a large public university. In this merged sample, we find that female professors’ RMP reviews are still significantly lower even conditional on their official evaluations for the same period. While our main findings are consistent with previous studies, we contribute to this literature by providing evidence on the inconsistency between textual reviews and numerical ratings as well as online ratings and official evaluations in terms of the gender

Professor Identity and Student Grades

Rey Hernández-Julián
,
Metropolitan State University of Denver
Christina Peters
,
Metropolitan State University of Denver

Abstract

Our study examines how the interaction of student and professor identities impacts the grades that students earn in courses. We observe a sample of over one million student grades earned over five years at a large, non-selective public university. The inclusion of student-level fixed effects, a contribution of our study, is possible due to the students taking many courses with professors of varying gender, ethnic, and political identities, allowing us to identify off the interaction of the professors’ and the students’ traits. We find that sharing a racial, ethnic, or gender identity has a significant positive impact on student grades that persists in online courses. We also examine political affiliation and find that Democratic and unaffiliated professors grade harder than Republican ones, even when including course, term, major, and student fixed effects. Females and non-white students earn higher grades from Democratic professors than from non-Democratic professors, but this effect largely disappears in online courses.

Does Marketing that Targets Prospective Female Economics Majors Improve Diversity?

Kathryn Vasilaky
,
California Polytechnic State University
Jacqueline Doremus
,
California Polytechnic State University

Abstract

The economics major is sometimes perceived as aggressive and competitive. Given that women shy away from competitive environments given the same skill level as men in many settings, the latter may help explain the large gender gap in economics college enrollment. Because many public universities require students to declare their major when applying, the economics pipeline depends, in part, on how many women apply to college as economics majors. College marketing materials are thus an important policy lever for decreasing the gender gap in economics. This paper reports initial results from a randomized control trial of college marketing materials that emphasized teamwork, working in groups, images of female professors, and images of women of color. Colleges purchase and otherwise accumulate contact information for prospective applicants and send them marketing materials. We focus on a pool of 25,000 prospective students to a regional university, of which about 60% were randomly assigned to receive modified university marketing messages with greater visibility of women in groups. We assessed the impact of this messaging on the likelihood of attending an open house as well as on enrollment. We augment our results with a matching strategy that includes other prospects whose identity was acquired through the same source as the experimental pool. We find our messaging decreased open house attendance and enrollment for white women but increased it for all men, with a net effect of increasing the gender gap. Men of color’s open house attendance and enrollment was particularly affected. This result may be consistent with past studies that find that men respond more to images of women in the uptake of a loan, and that having more female peers makes men more likely to excel academically, but sometimes makes women less likely to pursue STEM or business and
JEL Classifications
  • A2 - Economic Education and Teaching of Economics