The Influence of Instructor Gender on Learning and Instructor Ratings

This paper uses two large databases to determine if students of a given gender learn more from instructors of the same gender and if instructors of a given gender receive higher ratings from students of the same gender compared to students of the opposite gender. The Indiana University (IU) data set was collected over a six-year period from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1990 for associate instructors teaching introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics courses. A subset of the data collected in norming the third edition of the Test of Understanding College Economics is the TUCE III data set. The results of this study do not lend support for a positive gender-match role model effect concerning student learning and instructor ratings. This effect appeared only in the IU micro data set but did not appear on a consistent yearly basis. The effect did not appear at all in the IU macro data or either of the TUCE III data sets