Students rate identical lectures differently based on professor’s gender, researchers find

Students may judge professors differently based on gender, even when the teaching is identical. A study in Philosophical Psychology provides evidence that implicit stereotypes continue to shape evaluations in ways that could affect academic careers.

The study was motivated by concerns about the fairness of student evaluations of teaching, particularly in disciplines like philosophy, which remain heavily male-dominated. Across European academia, women account for a substantial share of early-career researchers but are still underrepresented at the full professor level. In Italy, for example, women make up only 27% of full professors despite being nearly half of the academic workforce at earlier stages.

Philosophy is one of the disciplines with the most pronounced gender disparities. In Italian philosophy departments, women comprise less than a third of full and associate professors combined. Prior research suggests that fields perceived as “male-typed” tend to carry implicit expectations that ideal performers embody stereotypically masculine traits like assertiveness, confidence, and authority. This can create a double bind for women, who are often penalized for being too assertive while also being judged as less competent when they express communal or nurturing traits.

“Our project began with personal and anecdotal evidence. In our daily experience, we noticed that students often behaved differently depending on whether they were interacting with men or women professors and these patterns varied with the gender of the students themselves,” said study author Pia Campeggiani, an associate professor of moral philosophy at the University of Bologna and author of Theories of Emotion: Expressing, Feeling, Acting.

“We wanted to understand whether these impressions were backed up by systematic data and we were surprised to discover that, in the Italian context, no such data existed. This absence in itself seemed telling and it convinced us that we needed to design and conduct our own studies in order to investigate the phenomenon directly.

“Our broader aim is for this research to help build a stronger empirical foundation for institutional policies, which in Italian academia remain largely inadequate for effectively confronting gender discrimination and marginalization. To give just one example of the structural imbalance: in the philosophy department where I work, at Bologna University, the number of women full professors is only one quarter of that of their men colleagues.”

The research team conducted two separate experiments. In both studies, participants were philosophy students or recent graduates from Italian universities. The students were asked to evaluate short lecture excerpts that were identical in content but varied in the gender of the professor attributed to them.

In the first study, 95 participants read four lecture excerpts on philosophical topics, including Aristotle’s ethics and Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power. Each excerpt was randomly assigned a fictitious male or female name. After reading each passage, participants answered questions about the clarity, interest, perceived competence, self-confidence, care, and overall engagement they felt toward the lecturer. These evaluations mirrored the types of items typically found in real-world student evaluations.

The second study involved 92 participants and used the same lecture excerpts, but this time delivered as audio recordings by voice actors selected to represent typical male and female vocal characteristics. Again, participants evaluated each lecture on the same seven dimensions and completed an additional questionnaire measuring their beliefs about gender roles.

By manipulating only the apparent gender of the professor—either via a name or a voice—the researchers aimed to isolate the effects of gender bias on teaching evaluations.

In the first study, male participants consistently rated lectures more favorably when they were attributed to a man. This was true across several key dimensions, including clarity, interest, competence, self-confidence, and perceived benefit. Men also showed a greater willingness to take a full course with a male professor. The only area where they rated women higher was in perceived care, consistent with stereotypes that associate women with nurturing roles.

In contrast, women participants in the first study showed little bias in their evaluations, except when it came to engagement. Like men, they expressed a greater willingness to enroll in a full course when the professor was male. The researchers suggest this may reflect the influence of deeper, possibly unconscious biases that persist even when women consciously attempt to judge content fairly.

“We were surprised by the behaviour of women participants in our first study, which used written texts,” Campeggiani told PsyPost. “In their evaluations, women participants were relatively unbiased: they rated lectures similarly, regardless of whether they believed the instructor was a man or a woman. Yet when asked whether they would take a full course with that instructor, they showed a clear preference for men.”

“We have hypothesized that women participants may have been able to suppress bias in straightforward, text-based evaluations, but that bias re-emerged when their attention shifted toward personal choices and motivations. Another possible explanation is that the low gender salience of the text condition led participants to perceive women professors as exhibiting masculine-coded traits. This may have prompted women participants to evaluate women professors as positively as men, while simultaneously triggering a backlash against counter-stereotypical behavior, expressed in their reluctance to commit to a full course with a woman professor.”

The second study, which used spoken rather than written lectures, found even broader evidence of gender bias. In this version, both male and female participants rated male professors higher across nearly all dimensions, including clarity, interest, competence, and self-confidence. Women were still rated more highly on care. This pattern held even for participants who reported egalitarian views about gender roles.

“In our second study, where the gender of the professors was made more salient through the use of audio recordings, women participants displayed the same gender biases as men participants,” Campeggiani said.

The second study also found that students’ explicit beliefs about gender equality, as measured by a standardized questionnaire, were not strongly related to their actual evaluations. Even students with progressive attitudes tended to favor male professors. This suggests that implicit biases can operate independently of a person’s stated values and may remain influential even when individuals consciously reject traditional gender norms.

The results indicate that “there is still a great deal of work to be done,” Campeggiani told PsyPost. “One of our findings is that explicit egalitarian beliefs do not necessarily translate into the absence of gender bias. In other words, nobody is immune. We are all at risk of falling prey to these ‘mindbugs’ and for this reason we must actively cultivate self-awareness and self-criticism. At the same time, we need to put in place procedural safeguards: rules and structures that help ensure our decisions, choices, and assessments are less biased and more impartial.”

But there are a few limitations to note. The study focused specifically on philosophy students in Italy, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to other academic fields or cultural contexts. While the researchers made efforts to select gender-neutral lecture content and control for confounding variables, real-world classroom dynamics involve more interpersonal interaction than what was simulated in the experiments.

The researchers are interested in extending their work. “We are considering several possible next steps,” Campeggiani explained. “One is to extend this line of research to primary and secondary schools, in order to see how early these patterns of bias emerge. Another is to replicate our study within academia but across different disciplines, to explore whether the dynamics we observed in philosophy are shared more broadly or vary by field.

“It wasn’t easy to carry out this study,” she added. “At various stages we encountered a certain degree of resistance, which in itself speaks to the sensitivity of the topic. I’ll leave it at that, but I think the difficulty is part of what makes the work both necessary and worthwhile.”

The study, “The boys’ club: gender biases in students’ evaluations of their philosophy professors,” was authored by Pia Campeggiani, Marco Viola, and Marco Marini.