Gender Gap in Teaching Evaluations and its Effect on Course Enrollments

The disparity in teaching evaluations between male and female instructors is well documented. This paper demonstrates that, even when controlling for specific components of the same evaluation surveys, students tend to give lower overall ratings to female instructors compared to their male counterparts. Importantly, on popular rating platforms used by students, the average overall ratings are more prominently displayed than the detailed components of these evaluations. To explore the potential implications of this, we analyze data from two widely used teaching evaluation tools at a U.S. public research university: the online platform RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) and official university-conducted evaluations. By merging RMP ratings, official evaluations, and course enrollment data, we find that RMP’s overall quality ratings have a greater influence on course enrollment than official evaluations, particularly affecting the enrollment decisions of female students. Additionally, our analysis reveals that conditional on all of these evaluations, male students have lower enrollment rates in the sections of the same courses offered by female instructors even when accounting for the average grades in these courses from previous semesters.