Unpacking Backlash: Individual and Contextual Moderators of Bias against Female Professors

Abstract

This research unpacks backlash against female professors by examining how individual characteristics and social context interact to predict student evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com. As predicted, students evaluated female professors in high-status departments more negatively than female professors in low-status departments, and this backlash effect was attenuated when the female professor was “hot.” Moreover, backlash was most pronounced for female professors who had been hired more recently and who were tough graders. A follow-up experiment replicated the main findings concerning status and attractiveness and suggested that perceived gender nonconformity may help to explain backlash against female professors.

Acknowledgments

We thank our talented research assistants, Leah Robinson, Amy Rowley, Maria Weaver, Sydney Gelineau-Olay, Nina Perisic, Rachelle Janicki, Maggie Fung, and Anja Hess.

Notes

1 The vulnerability hypothesis was previously labeled the shield hypothesis in our preregistration on OSF.

2 This number represents the average salary of history, philosophy, and English professors excluding art history professors according to Salary.com.

3 We also recorded the number of individual ratings that were made for each professor. Accounting for this variable did not alter the results we report.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Master’s scholarship to Alexandra N. Fisher and a SSHRC Insight Grant under 435-2014-1579 to Danu Anthony Stinson.