Contextualizing gender disparities in online teaching evaluations for professors.

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is widely used to assess teaching effectiveness in higher education and can significantly influence professors' career outcomes. Although earlier evidence suggests SET may suffer from biases due to the gender of professors, there is a lack of large-scale examination to understand how and why gender disparities occur in SET. This study aims to address this gap in SET by analyzing approximately 9 million SET reviews from RateMyProfessors.com under the theoretical frameworks of role congruity theory and shifting standards theory. Our multiple linear regression analysis of the SET numerical ratings confirms that women professors are generally rated lower than men in many fields. Using the Dunning log-likelihood test, we show that words used in student comments vary by the gender of professors. We then use BERTopic to extract the most frequent topics from one- and five-star reviews. Our regression analysis based on the topics reveals that the probabilities of specific topics appearing in SET comments are significantly associated with professors' genders, which aligns with gender role expectations. Furtherly, sentiment analysis indicates that women professors' comments are more positively or negatively polarized than men's across most extracted topics, suggesting students' evaluative standards are subject to professors' gender. These findings contextualize the gender gap in SET ratings and caution the usage of SET in related decision-making to avoid potential systematic biases towards women professors.

How parenthood contributes to gender gaps in academia.

Being a parent has long been associated with gender disparities in academia. However, details of the mechanisms by which parenthood and gender influence academic career achievement and progression are not fully understood. Here, using data from a survey of 7,764 academics in North America and publication data from the Web of Science, we analyze gender differences in parenthood and academic achievements and explore the influence of work-family conflict and partner support on these gender gaps. Our results suggest that gender gaps in academic achievement are, in fact, "parenthood gender gaps." Specifically, we found significant gender gaps in most of the measures of academic achievement (both objective and subjective) in the parent group but not in the non-parent group. Mothers are more likely than fathers to experience higher levels of work-family conflict and to receive lower levels of partner support, contributing significantly to the gender gaps in academic achievement for the parent group. We also discuss possible interventions and actions for reducing gender gaps in academia.

The gendered nature of authorship.

Authorship is the primary form of symbolic capital in science. Despite this, authorship is rife with injustice and malpractice, with women expressing concerns regarding the fair attribution of credit. Based on an international survey, we examine gendered practices in authorship communication, disagreement, and fairness. Our results demonstrate that women were more likely to experience authorship disagreements and experience them more often. Their contributions to research papers were more often devalued by both men and women. Women were more likely to discuss authorship with coauthors at the beginning of the project, whereas men were more likely to determine authorship unilaterally at the end. Women perceived that they received less credit than deserved, while men reported the opposite. This devaluation of women's work in science creates cumulative disadvantages in scientific careers. Open discussion regarding power dynamics related to gender is necessary to develop more equitable distribution of credit for scientific labor.

The academic advantage: gender disparities in patenting.

We analyzed gender disparities in patenting by country, technological area, and type of assignee using the 4.6 million utility patents issued between 1976 and 2013 by the United States Patent and Trade Office (USPTO). Our analyses of fractionalized inventorships demonstrate that women's rate of patenting has increased from 2.7% of total patenting activity to 10.8% over the nearly 40-year period. Our results show that, in every technological area, female patenting is proportionally more likely to occur in academic institutions than in corporate or government environments. However, women's patents have a lower technological impact than that of men, and that gap is wider in the case of academic patents. We also provide evidence that patents to which women--and in particular academic women--contributed are associated with a higher number of International Patent Classification (IPC) codes and co-inventors than men. The policy implications of these disparities and academic setting advantages are discussed.