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Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Sexism in the Classroom: The Role of Gender Stereotypes in the Evaluation of Female Faculty

Anita M. Superson
University of Kentucky

I. Some Anecdotes

On my first day of teaching, a male student raised his hand and asked with genuine skepticism, "Could you tell us your qualifications for teaching this class?"

When one of my best male students found out in the fourteenth week of the semester that I not only had a Master’s degree, but also a Ph.D., he responded, "This changes everything," suggesting that he did not believe what I had said until this point.

During a discussion about moral skepticism, an older male student interrupted me to say, "That’s not the skeptic’s position. I’ll tell you what the skeptic’s position is," and then tried to set me straight on a topic I have been researching and publishing in for some ten years. He later complained to the chairperson that I was too young to be teaching the course.

During a complex lecture on Hume’s moral theory, a female graduate student asked, "Did you get these notes from a class you took in graduate school, or are you just making this up?" This incident occurred shortly after I returned the students’ papers on which I had commented extensively.

A male student in an upper-division course, who repeatedly displayed confusion about the issues, sat in the back of the room and through my detailed lectures shook his head "No," suggesting that I did not know what I was talking about. When I reprimanded him for his behavior after class, he told me in no uncertain terms that I did not know how to do philosophy.

On the third day of an introductory-level class, I twice told a couple of disruptive male students to leave the room, but they did not budge. I then told them that I was not going to lecture any more until they left, but they remained in their places. Finally, I left. The students preferred to have the class miss a lecture than to acknowledge their disrespectful behavior and give me the upper hand.

On the first day of an introductory-level course, when I walked into the room two male students in the back row said out loud, "All right!," suggesting that since I was a young-looking female, the class would be a "piece of cake."

In the course of a long discussion during which I went over a male student’s paper with him line by line, he sat back with his arms folded across his chest and asked, "What mood are you in when you grade these papers?"

The second time I taught an introductory feminism course, a male student not in the class wrote a highly disparaging editorial about me in the independently owned school paper. In it he claimed that "the professor just howls at the males and preaches her feminist teaching to the females in the class," and that my course was "really about hatred." He referred to me as "the She-devil in charge," and suggested that I had unfair power over the students since I controlled the grading.

In a sixteen-week health care ethics course, attended mostly by students from typically conservative fields such as premedicine, I briefly discuss the treatment of women in the health care system and conservative, moderate, and liberal positions on abortion. My teaching evaluations commonly include derogatory descriptions, such as "bitch" or "Nazifem."

* * *

Every female professor I know has relayed to me similar anecdotes. I surmise that male and female students often harbor sexist beliefs about women that are common in society at large. Women are both expected to be and believed to be more emotional than rational, passive, supportive, nonassertive, deferential, caring, and nurturing. For female professors, these traits translate into the expectations and beliefs that they are less competent than their male colleagues, are easy graders, grade according to emotion instead of reason, are more tolerant of disruptive behavior in class, give students breaks on cheating, let students control the class, are less logical and more disorganized, and so on. In contrast, men are expected to be and believed to be aggressive, more rational than emotional, knowledgeable, directive, in control, and so on. The traits that men are both expected and believed to exhibit are the same traits that characterize the stereotypical—but not necessarily ideal—professor, which is not surprising since most professors have been and still are men. Thus female, but not male, professors find themselves in conflicting roles: the role of female and the role of professor.¹ This conflict is made apparent in students’ ratings of female professors in evaluations.

II. The Backlash

The student behaviors I have relayed in the anecdotes are not merely examples of sexism. I want to argue that, both in themselves and as reflected in teaching evaluations of female instructors, they function to maintain a backlash against women. In her well-known book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,² Susan Faludi argues persuasively that the United States of the 1980s experienced a backlash against women’s progress. Faludi explains backlash as an episode in which resistance to women’s rights and independence is in an acute stage. Backlashes, she observes, have always been triggered by the perception—accurate or not—that women are making great strides. These outbreaks are backlashes because they have always arisen in reaction to women’s "progress," caused not simply by a bedrock of misogyny but by the specific efforts of contemporary women to improve their status, efforts that have been interpreted time and again by men—especially men grappling with real threats to their economic and social well-being on other fronts—as spelling their own masculine doom.³

A backlash, then, is an episode of intensified sexism caused by the perception that women are gaining power. Various behaviors occurring during a backlash attempt to set back women to the position they previously held—that is, to halt their accrual of power.

A variety of factors contribute to keeping women down in and/or out of the academy. One is sexism in the classroom, expressed informally in students’ behavior as described in the anecdotes, as well as formally in teaching evaluations grounded in gender bias. Teaching evaluations often play a significant role in decisions about raises, promotion, and tenure. Insofar as they reflect gender bias, they can function to keep women out of power. Informal sexist classroom behavior can have a similar effect, since it places an extra burden on women, causes undue stress, and makes women act in guarded ways in the classroom, all of which contribute to an unpleasant if not hostile environment. It can drive women away from the profession, or negatively affect their teaching, and hence teaching ratings.

Faludi attributes the cause of a backlash especially, if not exclusively, to men who feel threatened by women’s progress. This includes hostile—usually male—students (such as those described in some of my anecdotes) who make the classroom environment threatening, and who negatively rate women—especially those who import feminist ideas into their courses—on teaching evaluations. It includes also hostile colleagues and administrators who weight heavily this and other negative information in deciding a woman’s fate in academia. But while this small, albeit outspoken, minority might get the backlash going, participants in a backlash do not have to feel threatened by women’s advancements; they can simply be uncomfortable with them. Both male and female students often tacitly endorse sexist stereotypes. Nor need it be the case that participants in a backlash intentionally aim to set back women. Once a backlash gets going, sexist practices are put into place and anyone can participate in sustaining male domination even without reflection. Most students I have described in the anecdotes fall into this class; they have no political analysis of their actions. Colleagues and administrators too commonly also lack feminist vision, though I believe that they are responsible for sustaining the backlash in a deeper way than students. The power to change the way women are evaluated in the academy rests with them, and they have a legal obligation not to discriminate against their employees with respect to their compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment on the basis
of sex.⁴

III. The Studies

Interpreting studies is always controversial. Nevertheless, I believe that the studies done on teaching evaluations of female faculty are instructive. They reveal that teaching evaluations are affected in complex ways by students’ expectations, which, in turn, are shaped by gender biases about professor behavior. We can learn lessons from these results, which, I believe, have to do with the backlash against feminist-inspired progress.

When looked at generally, studies on teacher ratings and gender yield mixed results. One survey revealed that "laboratory" studies of student ratings of hypothetical instructors yielded no difference in the overall ratings of male and female teachers in the majority of cases, but in a few of the remaining, males were rated more highly than females. In no study did females receive higher ratings than males.⁵ But in eight of twenty-eight studies conducted on actual teachers that had statistically significant differences, female instructors had slightly higher overall evaluations than did male instructors.⁶

But closer inspection is revelatory. The ratings of female instructors divide up along the lines of whether these instructors conform to gender stereotypes. More exactly, the studies can be divided into four categories, including those demonstrating that students (1) reward conformists; (2) penalize nonconformists; (3) penalize conformists, and (4) reward nonconformists. Let me speak briefly to the fourth category. In the few studies showing that students rate highly nonconforming female professors, researchers attribute these results to students’ perceiving these women as exceptions.⁷ Undoubtedly, women who succeed in male-dominated disciplines have to be much better all around than their male counterparts, in which case merit subverts sexism in their ratings.⁸ In each of the remaining three categories, I want to argue that a negative or a positive rating for sexist reasons contributes to the backlash against women.

A. Rewarding Conformists

Several studies show that students rate female instructors more highly than males because they conform to traditional female stereotypes. One four-year study revealed that 75 percent of the time male instructors received significantly higher ratings than female instructors on questions about fairness, thought stimulation, organization, nonrepetition, knowledge, and overall, but females were rated more highly on sensitivity and student comfort.⁹ Another study testing for students’ perception of the "feminine" quality of warmth, found that students perceived female instructors to be warmer, more encouraging, and less authoritarian than men.¹⁰ Female instructors’ global ratings in this study were significantly higher than those of males, influenced by their ratings on willingness to assist, encouraging expression, and ability to arouse and sustain interest. A third study showed that female professors are rewarded more than males for being nurturing or supportive when it comes to grading.¹¹ If a male professor were to raise a student’s expected grade by one point, his total score on the 100-point evaluation would rise by 3.36 points, but if a female were to do the same, her evaluation would rise considerably more—by 5.65 points.

Were ratings on "masculine" and "feminine" traits not variable along gender lines, we might conclude that students prefer and rate highly professors with both traits. But these studies do not show this. Instead, they suggest that students expect female professors to exhibit "feminine" traits, and when they perceive that they do, they rate them highly. In essence, they rate a female highly because she is a good woman, not a good professor. To reward a professor for being a good professor is to acknowledge that she or he does and should have institutional power. In contrast, to reward a female professor for conforming to gender stereotypes is to reward her for exhibiting traits that are typically inconsistent with having power and being able to use it in a meaningful way, including being subservient, nurturing, easy—in short, nonthreatening.

I want to suggest that even positively rating women for these sexist reasons contributes to the backlash. Rewarding women for being feminine effectively disciplines gender conformity, punishing women who are not conventionally feminine, and rewarding behaviors that mark inferiority and maintain male domination. For instance, being nonassertive makes a woman reticent to complain about unfair practices in the workplace, such as pregnancy leave policies. Being deferential makes a woman less likely to speak her mind in department meetings. Being nurturing makes a woman devote much of her time to "ego-feeding," which takes away time from her other work and can lead to a loss of self.¹²

B. Penalizing Nonconformists

Consistent with studies showing that female faculty are rewarded for conforming to gender stereotypes are studies showing that they are penalized with lower ratings for not conforming. Several studies show that to achieve the same student ratings on likeability, supportiveness, and even competence, female professors are required to be warmer and more social than their male counterparts, and engage in feminine behavior such as smiling and making eye contact.¹³ Female professors are also rated more negatively than males for not being nurturing or supportive when it comes to grading. In one study, female professors were rated more harshly than males for being hard graders.¹⁴ It seems fair to conjecture that female faculty get docked more often than males for straying from their expected gender roles, which is to be expected since they simultaneously inhabit conflicting roles of woman and professor.

Female instructors are similarly penalized for violating gender norms surrounding classroom presentation style.¹⁵ The "feminine" style of classroom presentation allows for a lot of student input, whereas the "masculine" style of presentation consists in lecturing. In one study the more classroom time a female instructor spent in presenting material by way of lecture, the lower were her likability ratings, but the more time male instructors spent lecturing, the higher their likability ratings.¹⁶ The same study also found no evidence that students resent female instructors who use their authority in the classroom, so long as they temper this authority with interactive teaching methods. Interactive teaching can unite the conflicting roles of the female professor as "woman" and as "professor" by, for example, creating a classroom atmosphere where students are equal partners in the pursuit of knowledge. The study found that female professors who display authority in "feminine" ways—for example, by responding to student challenges with great patience, or reprimanding students in a friendly rather than embarrassing way—are not penalized on evaluations, but they are penalized if they display authority in stereotypical male ways. Male professors’ likeability ratings, in contrast, are not affected by displaying authority using solely negative evaluations, and admonishing interruptions from students. Thus hostility toward women in positions of power is revealed in formal studies of teaching ratings, as well as in informal anecdotal evidence.

Some studies show that faculty who teach women’s studies courses or raise feminist issues in the context of other courses are downgraded in their evaluations. One found that for students to accept a female instructor’s authority and judgment in presenting "a balanced interpretation of pertinent viewpoints," it is doubly important that she be seen as compelling, self-assured, and professional.¹⁷ This suggests that if a female instructor brings up feminist or other politically controversial perspectives, she will be rated negatively if she has not also convinced students of her competence. Some researchers attribute feminist-influenced negative ratings to the fact that feminist issues "are more likely than many others to challenge students’ personal assumptions" and hence generate anger, and to "be viewed as extraneous and not ‘real’," thereby detracting from perception of the faculty member as competent.¹⁸

Further evidence that a rejection of women’s power is at the root of discrepancies in teaching evaluations of female and male instructors can be found in several studies demonstrating differences in the way female and male students rate instructors. These studies have mixed results, and some show no discrepancies. Others, however, show that the lowest ratings given to female instructors come from male students. One study found that male and female students rated male professors similarly, but male students frequently rated female professors the lowest on "masculine" qualities including appropriate speech, fairness, thought stimulation, and nonrepetition.¹⁹ Another found that male students rated female professors significantly lower than males on teacher appeal and effectiveness, scholarship, organization and clarity, dynamism and enthusiasm, and overall teaching ability, the most negative ratings being given by male engineering majors, traditionally a conservative group.²⁰ A third study found that male students rated female social science instructors (but not male social science instructors or female women’s studies instructors) lower than did female students on preparation, decisiveness, participatory decision making, and likeability.²¹ A fourth found that women receive the most negative ratings when they are in nontraditional fields, especially from male students who hold conservative views about women’s roles.²²

Women are aberrations in the academy, which makes students see them as women first, professors second, all the while trying to fit them into one mold. At worst, some students do not want women in power; women should not be professors at all, they claim. At best, many students implicitly assume that women should be very different kinds of professors than men, exhibiting contradictory "feminine" and "professorial" traits. Men, on the other hand, are seen as professors and men at the same time—there is no differentiation and so no conflict between their roles. Thus men start off ahead of women in the classroom. Rating female faculty negatively for the sexist reason that they are not "feminine" contributes to the backlash because, first, it can negatively affect a woman’s success in academia; second, it perpetuates the view that men are better professors than women; third, it sends the message that women should exhibit "feminine" traits, or risk punishment by students; and fourth, it may make female professors more guarded than males in the classroom, negatively affecting their self-confidence and students’ perception of their competence.

C. Penalizing Conformists

Still other studies show that even if female instructors conform to gender stereotypes, students do not necessarily reward them, and conformity may even lead to other penalties. Female faculty spend significantly more time holding office hours and give students more personal attention than males. Students expect this: 40 percent reported that they would not hesitate to call a female professor at home, but only 19 percent said they would call a male professor at home.²³ Yet 20 percent of the students judged their female professors to be "insufficiently available," while only 8 percent made the same judgment about their male professors.²⁴ Conformity, then, is expected, but for this reason is not necessarily rewarded; to be rewarded, female faculty have to be exceptional.

Furthermore, female instructors receive lower ratings for conforming to gender stereotypes when the stereotypical traits obviously conflict with those students commonly associate with a good professor. One study found that the more female professors solicited students about their understanding of the material, and the more time they spent in responding to students’ questions, the lower they were rated on competence, a "masculine" trait.²⁵ Additionally, even though a greater number of interruptions by students raised a female professor’s likeability rating, it lowered her competence rating, though not significantly.²⁶ Another study found that students are less tolerant of what they perceive as a lack of formal "professionalism" in female professors’ behavior in the classroom. Formal professionalism includes being very organized, maintaining tight control of discussion, and clearly outlining student responsibilities, versus being more laissez-faire and requiring students to assume a greater burden of responsibility.²⁷ Thus, female faculty are stuck in a "double bind": studies show that they are penalized both for not conforming and for conforming to gender stereotypes.

There is also a "double burden": when it comes to rating professors, students expect only female professors to exhibit both "feminine" and "masculine"/"professorial" traits. One study suggests that although male professors need to be strong in organization, explanations, and dynamism to receive favorable ratings, female professors need to be strong in these "male" areas as well as in "female" areas such as being sensitive to students’ feelings, treating students with respect, and making students feel free to express their ideas.²⁸ Another found that "a highly structured instructional approach . . . was consistently more important for women’s performance ratings than for men’s,"²⁹ suggesting that female professors’ "female" traits need to be "tempered" by "male" traits. Another study found that male students rated most highly female social science instructors (versus male social science instructors and female women’s studies faculty) who had both the "feminine" traits of friendliness, frequent smiling, and frequent eye contact, as well as the "masculine" traits of confidence and decisiveness.³⁰ One set of researchers concluded: "if female instructors want to obtain higher student ratings, they must be not only highly competent with regard to factors directly related to teaching but also careful to act in accordance with traditional sex role expectations."³¹

Penalizing female faculty for these sexist reasons contributes to the backlash in ways other than stifling their success. It perpetuates the view that men are better professors than women since men are serious, while women are unprofessional. And it treats women unfairly. In a culture in which women are socialized to conform to female stereotypes as a part of male dominance, some women are likely to turn out having the relevant traits. But to penalize women for exhibiting these traits is unfair: men are in fact rewarded, or at least experience no drop in their ratings, when they conform to male stereotypes. Women do not enjoy the same freedom men have to teach in different ways, within the bounds of competence and effectiveness; in effect they are denied equal opportunity to flourish in their profession.

IV. Suggestions

We need to acknowledge that sexism shapes the teaching evaluations of female faculty, and act to counter this injustice. There is, unfortunately, no easy solution. Professors and administrators can try to make students aware of sexist biases, but in the short term they cannot expect to change them significantly, since their biases stem from deeply held beliefs that are generated and supported by sexist structures and practices in a patriarchal society. We should not advocate that female professors accommodate sexist expectations of their students; capitulation to sexism is hardly a feminist strategy. Furthermore, this requirement unfairly burdens them, and is otiose because the mixed results of the studies show that there is no one "right" way for female professors to behave.

One purported solution is to reconstruct radically teaching evaluations to prevent sexism from creeping in, but I am skeptical about its likely success. We might be able, at least, to screen for gender bias if evaluations asked students to describe their ideal professor, and then say how their own professor measured up. This would check for bias in much the same way as asking for a student’s expected grade checks for bias from a student who does poorly in the class. But it does not eliminate bias. And since gender bias can be more subtle than the bias a student receiving a poor grade harbors, gender-biased evaluations do not obviously come across as hostile, and so cannot be dismissed as aberrant.

Since bias is so difficult to eliminate, and people hard to change, the solution seems to rest with how evaluations are interpreted. Many universities have tried to mitigate the effect of student biases by instituting peer reviews and/or teaching portfolios, to be used in conjunction with evaluations. Peer reviews are suspect: unless we have good reason to believe that our colleagues, most of whom are men, do not harbor the same sexist expectations about women’s behavior, we can expect the biases to be duplicated.

Teaching portfolios show more promise in mitigating the effect of gender bias, though problems exist. Too often those making the relevant decisions ignore them and make judgments based solely on global ratings. They often judge a professor’s ratings in comparison to her or his colleagues’ ratings, but since most professors are male, the very bias portfolios aim to avoid may be replicated. Further, a female professor using a teaching portfolio to explain how sexism affected her ratings can be perceived as making excuses. Overcoming the power of negative ratings in one’s file is difficult: numbers speak louder than words. No individual teacher knows exactly how sexism factors into her ratings, so she will not be able unequivocally to explain away negative ratings, and there is no quick and easy formula for compensating for discrimination.

Yet if teaching portfolios are taken seriously, these problems might be overcome. I want to put the burden on universities to stop tolerating sexism: as employers, they need to convince us that they do not discriminate against any employee with respect to her compensation, or terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, which is legally and morally required. They need to try to end, rather than sustain, the backlash. They can begin to do this in a number of ways. First, administrators, chairpersons, and members of tenure and promotion committees all need to be made aware of, and take seriously, the results of the kind of studies I have discussed. Second, universities need to select people for these positions who are sensitive to sexism, not resistant to feminism, and do not want to dismiss this evidence as trivial. Third, universities should allow female faculty the opportunity to address gender biases in their teaching statements, and weigh teaching statements more heavily than ratings themselves when a persuasive case can be made that the ratings are lower due to gender bias. Fourth, and perhaps most important, universities need to require those involved in decisions about salaries, promotion, and tenure to show clearly and exactly how they have accounted for the demonstrable sexism in teaching evaluations. Failure to take even these minimal steps renders moot a university’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Women’s advancement to positions of power in academia does little good if they will be judged according to sexist standards when they come to occupy these positions.³²

Notes

1. See Elaine Martin, "Power and Authority in the Classroom: Sexist Stereotypes in Teaching Evaluations," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9, no. 3 (1984): 482–92, esp. 486, for this view.

2. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991).

3. Ibid., xix.

4. Civil Rights Act of 1964, EEOC Guidelines on Discrimination Because of Sex, 29 C.F.R. Sec. 1604.11(a) (1980). The Guidelines also prohibit discrimination on grounds of race, color, religion, and national origin. In this paper, I focus entirely on gender issues, although I believe that similar points can be made about race as well as the intersection between race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. At the least, much anecdotal evidence suggests to me that racial stereotyping negatively affects student ratings of nonwhite instructors, and contributes to an often-hostile classroom environment.

5. Kenneth A. Feldman, "College Students’ Views of Male and Female College Teachers: Part I—Evidence from the Social Laboratory and Experiments," Research in Higher Education 33, no. 3 (1992): 317–75, esp. 328 and 342. See also Kenneth A. Feldman, "College Students’ Views of Male and Female College Teachers: Part II—Evidence from Students’ Evaluations of Their Classroom Teachers," Research in Higher Education 34, no. 2 (1993): 151–91.

6. Ibid., Part II, 153.

7. Jim Sidanius and Marie Crane, "Job Evaluation and Gender: The Case of University Faculty," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 19, no. 2 (1989): 174–97. See also Bennett, op. cit., 175.

8. The connection between being exceptional and having high ratings is not a necessary one. The former dean of the University of Kentucky informed me that across the college, female faculty, many of whom undoubtedly are exceptional, consistently had lower global ratings on their teaching evaluations than males. My point is that high ratings can be attributed to merit. Also, rating highly women who are perceived to be exceptions is consistent with believing that women as a group are not as good as men. Thus we cannot infer from high ratings of exceptional women that sexism has disappeared, and the backlash ended.

9. Susan A. Basow, "Student Evaluations of College Professors: When Gender Matters," Journal of Educational Psychology 87, no. 4 (1995): 1–10.

10. Sheila Kishler Bennett, "Student Perceptions of and Expectations for Male and Female Instructors: Evidence Relating to the Question of Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluation," Journal of Educational Psychology 74, no. 2 (1982): 170–79, esp. 174–75.

11. Laura I. Langbein, "The Validity of Student Evaluations of Teaching," PS: Political Science and Politics 27, no. 3 (1994): 545–52.

12. The idea of "ego-feeding" comes from Sandra Bartky. See her "Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds: Deference and Disaffection in Women’s Emotional Labor," in Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 99–119.

13. Diane Kierstead, Patti D’Agostino, and Heidi Dill, "Sex Role Stereotyping of College Professors: Bias in Students’ Ratings of Instructors," Journal of Educational Psychology 80, no. 3 (1988): 342–44. See also Martin, op. cit.

14. The study showed that if a student’s expected grade is an "A," a female professor will be rated, on a 100-point scale, 2.5 points lower than a male professor. If the student’s expected grade is a "C," a male professor would have a rating of 88.08, but a female professor, 81.06, over seven points lower. See Langbein, op. cit.

15. Anne Statham, Laurel Richardson, and Judith A. Cook, Gender and University Teaching: A Negotiated Difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

16. Ibid., 11, 17, 66, 76, 77, 117, and 120. But the sexism is asymmetrical, due to both the results of the studies, and the reasons for professors’ ratings. The studies to which I refer show that women are penalized for both conforming and not conforming to female stereotypes, ratings which, I am arguing, are grounded in sexism. In contrast, men are either rewarded, or at least not penalized, for both conforming to male stereotypes, and for exhibiting both "masculine" and "feminine" traits, which is to be expected since both are acceptable or good ways for a professor to be, but only when the professor is male. The most telling study, however, would test student responses to male professors who exhibited only "feminine" traits. A negative rating of these professors would likely be attributed to the sexist reason that they are too much like women.

17. Bennett, op. cit., 176.

18. Bernice Resnick Sandler, Lisa A. Silverberg, and Roberta M. Hall, The Chilly Classroom Climate: A Guide to Improve the Education of Women (National Association for Women in Education, 1996), Part IV, 57–63, esp. 61.

19. Basow, op. cit., 6–7.

20. Susan A. Basow and Nancy T. Silberg, "Student Evaluations of College Professors: Are Female and Male Professors Rated Differently?" Journal of Educational Psychology 79, no. 3 (1987): 308–14, esp. 310, 311.

21. Martin, op. cit., 485, 491.

22. Basow, op. cit., 9.

23. Bennett, op. cit., 176.

24. Ibid., 177. Basow and Silberg, op. cit., confirmed Bennett’s results. They found that both male and female students rated female professors lower than male professors on availability to and contact with students.

25. Statham, et al., op. cit., 117.

26. Ibid., 119.

27. Bennett, op. cit., 173–74.

28. Basow, op. cit., 8.

29. Bennett, op. cit., 176.

30. Martin, op. cit., 491.

31. Kierstead et al., op. cit., 344.

32. I thank the anonymous referees for the Newsletter for their helpful comments. I thank especially Cressida Heyes for arduously reviewing several drafts of this paper, and for providing numerous insightful comments that made me rethink and clarify my views on many issues.

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APA Newsletters Fall 1999 Volume 99, Number 1

APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1