Gender bias in student assessment of teaching performance

Abstract

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is a worldwide, commonly used measure of teaching performance. Namely, higher educational institutions are in some countries, such as in Serbia, obliged to perform biannual SETs. Although the procedures and instruments of data collection vary, the purpose remains the same: get feedback on the quality of teaching from the universities' important stakeholder, the students themselves. The obtained results are usually purely analysed with the goal of further improvement of both the teaching process and the teacher's performance. However, an interesting question emerges: are students unbiased when evaluating their teachers? This study attempts to address the issue of gender bias in annual SET at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organizational Sciences. The presented analysis aimed to investigate whether there is difference in the SET scores between male and female teachers. We believe this study might shed light on how students are (un)biased when doing SET regarding the gender effect.