A multicenter study of gender bias in student evaluations of teaching in pharmacy programs

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used to assess effectiveness of teaching. Studies conducted to assess the presence of gender bias in SET have produced mixed results. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the presence and degree of gender bias in SET of didactic courses in United States pharmacy programs.

A three-year, retrospective, multi-institutional analysis of anonymous SET data were analyzed from required didactic courses. Analysis included gender, SET questions, mean scale score, and number of students responding to each question. A hierarchical linear model was used to compare the gender difference with the normalized SET scores as the outcome.

A total of 2114 SET scores were included from seven pharmacy schools across eight campuses. Analysis of the results revealed that the combined data were skewed secondary to one institution whose results fell significantly outside the mean. When this school was excluded, the difference between SET scores did not differ by gender, b = 0.021, t(1,702) = 0.69, P = .49, with similar SET scores for female faculty (mean = 4.41, SD = 0.35, range = 2.54-5) and male faculty (mean = 4.44, SD = 0.32, range = 2.67-5).

After secondary analysis, the aggregated data showed no significant difference between ratings of male and female instructors. However, there were differences within individual programs. This illustrates the importance of applying assessment principles to SET to determine the presence of bias so that continuous quality improvement strategies may be applied.