It seems that sexism exists even in an online learning environment, at least according to a new study where students rated male instructors higher than their female counterparts, even when those instructors were actually female and lied about their gender.

Sadly, these are the same kind of ratings that help or hurt instructors when it comes to things like performance reviews, hiring, promotions and tenure.

Researchers conducted their experiment on gender bias with a group of 43 university students enrolled in an online course. Of those 43, researchers divided them into four discussion groups. Two of the groups had a female instructor while the other two had a male instructor.

However, researchers had the instructors lie to students. The male instructor told his groups that he was female and the female instructor told her students that she was male. Because of the nature of online courses, the students never saw images or video of their instructor. All they had was their word to go on.

At the end of the course, researchers asked students to rate their instructors on such qualities as professionalism, interpersonal skills, fairness, enthusiasm and promptness. And that's when the gender bias presented its ugly head.

"We found that the instructor whom students thought was male received higher ratings on all 12 traits, regardless of whether the instructor was actually male or female," says Lillian MacNell, lead author of the paper on the experiment. "There was no difference between the ratings of the actual male and female instructors."

The experiment showed that when students thought that their instructor was female, they rated them lower than those that they thought were male, without any actual consideration of who was actually teaching the course. In particular, the ratings for promptness were eye-opening.

"Classwork was graded and returned to students at the same time by both instructors," says MacNell. "But the instructor students thought was male was given a 4.35 rating out of 5. The instructor students thought was female got a 3.55 rating."

So what does this tell us? This research suggests that students perceive male instructors as better at doing their job than female instructors, regardless of their job performance. Of course, that brings up the question, "Why?"

Researchers plan to continue their experiments to figure that out, as well as see if this bias expands across multiple courses and learning environments.

[Photo Credit: North Carolina State University]