FCQs are an integral part of teacher evaluation at the University of Colorado, and are always sealed and then turned in by students directly to the department in order to prevent fraud. (Nigel Amstock/CU Independent)
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With the end of the semester quickly approaching, there’s a lot to be looking forward to. With just a month to go, I’m feeling pretty anxious to get on with the summer, and the absurd amount of work that everyone has from now until then certainly isn’t helping to mitigate that feeling at all.
So I feel I can safely say that, at this point, students want to get on with the semester. For CU faculty and staff, though, the end of a semester means facing up to an unbelievable amount of feedback from peers and students. That’s right, everybody — it’s FCQ time. For students, these Faculty Course Questionnaires mean basically nothing, aside from the two to three minutes we take to fill out the bubbles and chuckle about how they said that this class required over eight hours of studying a week, even though we spent maybe two hours weekly on the material.
This is fine, because FCQs — which gauge student approval of professors and teaching assistants — are naturally aimed toward providing professors with feedback about how their students feel they are doing, and providing school administrators with a yardstick that measures how well (or terribly) their professors are doing. This is where the problem emerges.
One would assume that FCQs provide a reasonable assessment of a professor’s job in teaching material to undergraduate students, and they generally do — if you’re a man.
Women, on the other hand, are apt to receive lower student approval ratings than their male colleagues from both male and female students, and these low ratings largely ignored the actual effectiveness of their teaching. Even worse, recent data from an online-class-based North Carolina State University study has shown that students who think that they’re being taught by a male will rate the professor higher, even when it’s actually a woman.
The NC State study suggests that the approval ratings of female professors are not even linked to teaching methods or behavior in the classroom. If there are any doubters who think that just maybe female professors could still be worse teachers than their male counterparts, I’m here to tell you that’s not the case.
The response I got when I approached some of my (brilliant) female professors and TAs about this subject further evidences this discrepancy. I was honestly shocked at how matter-of-fact they seemed about it. And that shock wasn’t relieved at all when I found out how important FCQs can be to securing a career in academia.
“When you are on a tenure track, [FCQs] can affect you in that they can make it hard, if not impossible, to get tenure,” Michaele Ferguson, an associate professor in CU’s Department of Political Science, said. “For people who are not on a tenure track, getting low FCQ scores … could affect your chances of getting teaching the next semester. And for people who are already living in that situation, they are making so little money that they are extremely vulnerable.”
So, not only can low student approval affect an established professor, but it can crush the ambitions of graduate students and PhD candidates. And if female professors are receiving lower student approval ratings than their male counterparts, that gives us fewer tenured women in academia, and therefore limited perspectives in academic discourse.
But why, you may be asking, are women receiving lower student approval ratings than men, even when many of us have amazing female professors and TAs? The answer is complicated, and frankly, can be hard to accept.
“Women tend to do lower in FCQs in part because they are perceived as less authoritative in the classroom,” Ferguson said. “Students tend to associate being male with being more authoritative in the classroom.”
The implications here are huge, and unfortunately aren’t limited to universities. This is just one more example of women not being accepted as capable leaders and being denied respect when filling leadership positions in businesses, government or any other societal institution that you can think of. And, with women lacking leadership and power positions, men end up calling the shots for women. We all know how well that works out for women’s interests being represented and executed.
This is disconcerting for another reason. Our generation, Generation Y, considers itself to be largely rid of the sexual and racial inequalities that have plagued our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and we affirm that we are on the path to a more just and fair society. If we were truly tolerant we wouldn’t even consider that a woman could be an inherently worse candidate for an authoritative position.
Lastly, we should be worried because we come to college to learn new ways to think, not to have our biases affirmed. If we, the (presumably) educated, don’t believe that women can be capable leaders, who the hell will? We have to learn to change the crooked thinking that we have been taught. If we don’t, our generation will never reach the equitable society that we seem to think is inevitable.
If Generation Y is actually serious about gender equality, we can all take some measures to reeducate ourselves and help give qualified women the choice to be leaders if they so choose. I’m providing a link to an Implicit Bias test you can take — created by Harvard — that highlights the implied perceptions we have about women and what femininity should look like. The important thing to note here is that you can have negative biases about certain women’s behaviors even if that is against your beliefs. And ladies, don’t think you’re exempt here; we all have the capacity to internalize some negative stereotypes about women.
So, when you go to fill out those FCQs toward the end of the semester, consider that gender might make a difference in your approval. And if it does, reconsider, because the future of your female professors is at stake.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Grant Stringer at grant.stringer@colorado.edu.
