A Troubleshoot Test of Student Evaluations of Teaching: Role Congruity, Gendered Language, and Educational (In)Equalities

Abstract

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) play a central role in hiring, promotion, and retention decisions in higher education; however, research indicates that they may be influenced by perceptions about instructor identity rather than teaching effectiveness. Guided by role congruity theory, which suggests that gendered expectations influence judgments when individuals occupy roles historically associated with another sex or gender, this study examines how students’ written comments reflect stereotypes, notably those related to gender. Using qualitative analysis of narrative SET responses, we identify recurring linguistic patterns that reveal how gender intersects in shaping perceptions of (Black) cisgender faculty. Results from the study show that women instructors were frequently described in relational and mentorship-oriented language, whereas men instructors were framed in terms of authority, rigor, and intellectual challenge. While both groups received overall positive evaluations, these differentiated descriptors highlight subtle mechanisms through which bias can operate and reinforce normative expectations. We also consider our positionality as cisgender scholars and reflect on the broader cultural and institutional contexts that inform evaluations of teaching, underscoring the need for equitable and reflective evaluation practices to further educational equalities in higher education, including the disruption of cisnormativity.

1. Introduction

Faculty are the backbone of higher education in the United States, driving academic excellence, research innovation, and student success. Nationally, approximately 1.5 million individuals serve in faculty roles in the United States (U.S.), including more than 842,000 full-time members (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2024). In many academic settings, student evaluations of teaching have become a focal point for aligning teaching practices with institutional priorities for student learning and instructional quality. This study focuses on the gendered experiences of Black faculty in the context of student evaluations of teaching (SETs), with particular emphasis on gender differences.

1.1. Student Evaluations of Teaching and Faculty Assessment

Student evaluations of teaching remain a central tool in assessing instructional effectiveness in higher education (Cohen, 1980; Marsh, 1987), often influencing decisions related to hiring, tenure, and promotion (e.g., Leonard et al., 1985; Lindahl & Unger, 2010; MacNell et al., 2015; Martin, 2016; Mengel et al., 2019; Renström et al., 2021; Smith & Hawkins, 2011). Although SETs were initially designed to assess instructional improvement or quality (Cohen, 1980; Leonard et al., 1985), growing evidence suggests that they often reflect student perceptions rather than objective teaching performance (e.g., Lindahl & Unger, 2010; Padgett, 2021; Perry et al., 2015). Despite their widespread use, SETs have been criticized for susceptibility to bias, particularly regarding faculty characteristics such as gender and race (e.g., Aragón et al., 2023; Boring, 2017; Boring et al., 2016; Mengel et al., 2019; Renström et al., 2021; Rosen, 2017).

This study focuses exclusively on Black faculty in response to prior research demonstrating the distinct and systemic challenges they experience in academic settings (e.g., Aruguete et al., 2017; Perry et al., 2015; Smith & Hawkins, 2011; Thomas & Hollenshead, 2001; Williams, 2007) that are not fully captured by aggregated analyses of faculty of color (e.g., Anderson & Smith, 2005; Chávez & Mitchell, 2020; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; Kreitzer & Sweet-Cushman, 2021). These challenges include heightened scrutiny, disproportionate student bias in evaluations, and structural barriers rooted in anti-Black racism. Narrowing the scope allows for a more precise examination of these dynamics. It avoids obscuring patterns that may be unique to Black faculty when analyses are diluted across multiple racialized groups.

1.2. Sex/Gender Bias in SETs

Before reviewing this literature, we clarify that sex refers to biological assignments typically made at birth, whereas gender is understood as a social construct encompassing roles, expectations, and identities (e.g., Barr et al., 2024; Gahagan et al., 2015; Heidari et al., 2016; Hyde et al., 2019; Richardson, 2022; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Performative practices—tone of voice, affective expression, movement, and even dress—signify relational positioning within gendered hierarchies and determine gendered intelligibility (Connell, 2005; Morgenroth & Ryan, 2021).

Because student evaluations reflect perception rather than biological knowledge, research on bias in SETs largely captures responses to gendered expectations rather than biological sex. Because the terms sex and gender are frequently conflated in the SET literature (e.g., Li & Benton, 2017; MacNell et al., 2015) and because many students do not clearly distinguish between biological assignment and socially perceived identity, we use the term sex/gender bias to reflect how these constructs are operationalized in prior research.

Sex and/or gender bias in SETs reflects that women faculty frequently receive lower ratings and more critical commentary than men (e.g., Adams et al., 2022; Boring, 2017; Gelber, 2022; Heffernan, 2021; Kreitzer & Sweet-Cushman, 2021; Williams, 2007), even when teaching practices and student outcomes are held constant (e.g., Boring et al., 2016; Cannon & Cipriani, 2021; Chávez & Mitchell, 2020; Khokhlova et al., 2023; MacNell et al., 2015; Mengel et al., 2019). Quantitative and quasi-experimental studies suggest that these disparities stem from gendered expectations rather than objective differences in instructional quality. For example, in an extensive study of nearly 20,000 evaluations, students randomly assigned to men or women instructors rated women significantly lower, with bias being most substantial among men students, particularly in mathematics courses and against junior women faculty (Mengel et al., 2019).

At the same time, large-scale multivariate analyses of SET data, such as Li and Benton’s (2017) study of IDEA evaluations, report statistically detectable but substantively small gender differences in averaged teaching effectiveness scores after controlling for relevant covariates. This report suggests that instructor gender does not practically impact student evaluations. However, such aggregate analyses may obscure how gendered expectations surface in qualitative student commentary, where language, tone, and framing provide insight into the interpretive processes underlying evaluation.

Online blinding experiments further suggest that instructors receive higher ratings when perceived as men, regardless of their actual sex or gender (MacNell et al., 2015). Departmental sex and gender composition and course level also interact to reinforce these patterns, with women consistently receiving systematically lower evaluations (Mengel et al., 2019). These sex and gender differences are rooted in broader cultural stereotypes that automatically confer authority and competence to men, while requiring women to continually prove their expertise (Acker, 1990; A. Johnson, 2006; Miller & Chamberlin, 2000; Morris, 2011).

Prior researchers have documented differential gender patterns for faculty in SETs (Aragón et al., 2023; Kreitzer & Sweet-Cushman, 2021; Mengel et al., 2019). However, much of this work examines sex or gender as categorical variables without explicitly interrogating cisgenderism or the implicit privileging of cisgender identities within evaluation processes. As a result, the normative assumptions that shape how gender is perceived and evaluated in student feedback often remain unexamined. Recognizing its importance to the larger dialogue, we approach this issue through role congruity theory (RCT) to illuminate underlying dynamics.

1.3. RCT and Evidence

RCT (Eagly & Karau, 2002) offers a compelling framework for understanding sex and/or gender bias in SETs. The theory posits that when roles become gender-typed, observers develop implicit expectations about who should occupy those roles. Violations of these expectations—such as women teaching advanced courses or men teaching introductory ones—can result in negative evaluations. In academic departments, sex and/or gender composition and course level may reinforce these expectations, contributing to biased student feedback (e.g., Evans et al., 2024; Piatek-Jimenez et al., 2018).

A growing body of research applies RCT and provides direct evidence of gendered patterns in teaching evaluations, demonstrating how gender-typed roles shape implicit expectations and evaluative outcomes. For example, Aragón et al. (2023) found that students formed gendered expectations about who teaches upper- versus lower-level courses, and that violations of these expectations led to discriminatory evaluations. Meanwhile, Renström et al. (2021) showed that masculine descriptors increased perceptions of competence, while feminine descriptors enhanced approachability, illustrating how gendered traits align with different valued attributes in evaluations.

Moreover, Tahir Jan et al. (2023) concluded that role incongruity leads women faculty to be perceived as less competent and acceptable, as reflected in SETs, ultimately impeding their professional advancement and overall evaluation. Relatedly, Buser et al. (2022) interpreted penalties following behavioral role violations as consistent with RCT predictions, linking incongruity to adverse evaluative outcomes in Economics. Finally, Zheng et al. (2023) analyzed nine million online reviews and found that topic and sentiment patterns in student comments aligned with sex and/or gender role expectations, reinforcing the theory’s relevance in large-scale evaluative contexts.

1.4. Language Choice in SET Commentary

Almost two decades earlier, Zimmaro et al. (2006) and Lindahl and Unger (2010) noted the limited scholarly attention given to students’ open-ended comments in SETs. Although Lindahl and Unger (2010) piloted a small study that involved surveying faculty about negative feedback, the responses yielded a wide array of illustrative examples. Furthermore, Mitchell and Martin (2018) show that language use in open-ended SET comments regarding men instructors versus women instructors reflected dramatic differences. Interestingly, Padgett (2021) examined SETs within a community health nursing course, analyzing written comments collected over four semesters. The feedback was notably consistent and predominantly negative. Ultimately, the researcher analyzed the comments across three levels of discourse: the student–teacher interaction, the context of nursing education, and the broader social–historical framework.

Notably, qualitative comments in SETs often include language about personality, demeanor, or perceived “fit,” which can subtly reflect students’ implicit biases (Padgett, 2021). These remarks may carry stereotypes that are not reflected in numerical ratings but shape perceptions of teaching effectiveness and professional competence (Baruch, 2024; Boring et al., 2016). The open-ended feedback thus reveals recurring, interpretable patterns that help explain why numeric scores alone can mask bias.

These accounts also emphasize the need for further research into the qualitative experiences of faculty of color regarding SETs, underscoring how open-ended feedback can reflect not only gendered but also racialized perceptions of teaching effectiveness.

1.5. Areas for Further Investigation

While prior studies on SETs have concentrated mainly on numerical scores (e.g., Armitage & Deeprose, 2004; Boring et al., 2016; J. E. Johnson et al., 2019; Padgett, 2021; Smith & Hawkins, 2011; Theall & Franklin, 1991), deeper analysis of written feedback could reveal additional or more subtle forms of bias (e.g., Padgett, 2021; Sigurðardóttir et al., 2022; Zimmaro et al., 2006). Racial bias similarly affects SET outcomes, particularly for Black faculty, who often face heightened scrutiny and differential treatment in student feedback. Among Black faculty, gender remains underexamined, particularly in qualitative comments where language and tone may reveal subtle or compounded forms of bias.

2. Positionalities and Purpose

This manuscript is authored by two Black faculty members, one woman and one man, who were assigned female and male at birth and who participated in a four-person research team examining student evaluations of teaching within our shared department and institution. At the time of the study, we occupied different faculty ranks, which shaped our experiences of institutional power, visibility, and vulnerability. As a Black woman and man teaching in a predominantly white institution, we are aware that student evaluations are not neutral instruments and are often shaped by racialized and gendered perceptions of authority and competence. We recognize the interconnected nature of race and gender; however, our work focuses on gender within the context of Black faculty.

Our positionality as both participants and analysts afforded us deep contextual knowledge of the departmental culture and evaluation practices, while also requiring ongoing reflexivity in our interpretation of the findings. We approached this inquiry from a critical and interpretivist stance that centers lived experience as a valid source of knowledge. Throughout the analytic process, we engaged in interactive reflection and dialogue with the broader research team to interrogate our assumptions and to avoid essentializing conclusions about gender or instructional practice.

Our team comprises four Black faculty members. Two faculty members are women, and two are men. Notably, at the time of the inquiry, all four faculty members were at different ranks: lecturer, visiting assistant professor, tenure-track assistant professor, and tenured full professor, respectively. Our individual experiences with course evaluations led us to investigate our collective experiences as Black faculty members with student evaluations of our teaching. In this way, we hoped to gain insights into our collective experiences, not just as individuals, but as Black faculty in the same institution and department (Savage et al., forthcoming). Subsequently, we homed in on the data to examine them more closely and specifically what they indicated about us as instructors or about our instruction based on our sex/gender. This manuscript addresses that dimension of our inquiry.

For this paper, we investigated gendered insights from the open-ended comments. Unlike prior research that primarily emphasized numerical ratings, we focus on qualitative, open-ended feedback to uncover nuanced patterns in language, tone, and evaluation. By analyzing how Black instructors are described across gender, this study illuminates some of the mechanisms by which stereotypes and biases operate. In doing so, we contribute to scholarship on gender bias in faculty evaluation and underscore the need for more equitable, context-sensitive approaches to assessing teaching effectiveness. In this way, we offer important considerations for educational equalities in higher education, not just for students but also for faculty.

Research Question

The research question for this paper is: What patterns regarding sex and/or gender were evident in Black faculty’s SET? Relatedly, what are the implications of the insights gleaned from our SET?

3. Materials and Methods

The Individual Development and Educational Assessment (IDEA) System is a widely used student evaluation instrument that primarily emphasizes quantitative ratings of student progress toward instructor-selected learning objectives and overall teaching effectiveness. In addition to these standardized measures, institutions using IDEA may include open-ended comment fields that allow students to provide narrative feedback. Although these qualitative comments are not a central focus of the IDEA system’s analytic framework, they offer a valuable source of data for examining how students frame and interpret instructional experiences (IDEA Center, n.d.).

This manuscript draws open-ended comments from the IDEA evaluations of 22 courses for one academic year as part of a larger study of SET. The present study focused on these open-ended responses, leveraging them as qualitative data to explore gendered patterns in language, tone, and evaluative framing that may not be captured by quantitative metrics alone.

Specifically, we analyzed qualitative comments associated with four Black faculty members in the same department at a historically and predominantly white institution (HPWI) in the Southeastern US. The study employed a practitioner research design (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to adopt a critical and creative qualitative approach in exploring the SET data (Bhattacharya, 2017). Consequently, it foregrounded reflexivity to identify ways to improve teaching effectiveness and collaborative analyses to help us inquire into our collective pedagogies, supporting each other in our professional practice through a collective analysis of SET data from a single year.

3.1. Setting

This study draws on SETs from an HPWI in the Southeastern United States, where roughly 800 instructors serve in full- and part-time roles. Faculty demographics reflect national patterns, with approximately two-thirds identifying as men and one-third as women. Around 80% identify as White, while about 5% identify as Black or African American. Consistent with Padgett’s (2021) description, the SETs used in this university consist of two parts: Likert-scale questions yielding numeric ratings and an unstructured space for comments.

3.2. Analytic Process

We analyzed the open-ended SET comments in multiple phases to ensure depth and rigor. These stages included an initial individual qualitative coding process, a collaborative re/coding for fidelity, an artificial intelligence (AI) assisted coding of the data, and a corroborative finalization of the insights from the study.

3.2.1. Initial Individual Qualitative Coding

We uploaded the qualitative comments from the SET from all four faculty members to the qualitative data analysis software (QDAS), Dedoose (2025) Version 9.0.86. As part of a larger study, all four researchers served as analysts and participated collaboratively in the coding process. The data were analyzed by first applying a priori constructs and then conducting an initial round of coding using relevant categories, codes, and subcodes for both inductive and deductive analyses (Saldaña, 2019). Memos and code explanations within Dedoose helped researchers code individually with fidelity, to enable interrater reliability.

3.2.2. Team Review and Code Refining

Once the initial individual coding phase was completed, the research team reviewed the coded transcripts in pairs. The Black women instructors formed one pair, and the Black men instructors formed another. These pairs reviewed, critiqued, and refined the data coding. Following the coding refinement process, the full research team reconvened to finalize analytic themes and interpretive insights. This whole-team review constituted a second analytic phase that supported the rigor and trustworthiness of the findings.

3.2.3. AI-Assisted Affordances

Furthermore, given the rise of AI tools for data analysis, both within established QDAS already in qualitative researchers’ ecosystems and in more recently developed, intentionally designed AI QDAS, all four participant-researchers agreed to engage with such tools to test and corroborate insights from our initial human intelligence analyses. Notably, to verify and enhance our analytical interpretations for this manuscript, we drew on AILYZE’s (2025) AI-assisted features to clarify, expand, and refine our final analytic considerations regarding the gender perceptions evidenced in the SET. Thought-partnering with AILYZE (2025) helped to ensure the soundness of our multilevel analytic approach (Saldaña, 2019). These AI-assisted affordances helped ensure the robustness and quality of our analysis, not as substitutes, but as a complement to our human intelligence analyses.

3.2.4. Synthesized Clarity

The coding and analysis from all three rounds allowed us to refine our insights and finalize our synthesis in the larger study. Notably, the nuance between how students framed their women versus men instructors was not evident in our initial individual instructor coding using Dedoose, where each of us coded our own evaluations. Nor was this evident when we coded in gender-based pairs. Through our thought partnership with AILYZE (2025), we identified comparative distinctions in how the SET converged or differed, based on perceptions of the instructional roles played by instructors, particularly in relation to gender. We revisited and confirmed the analyses through our collaborative researcher expertise and human intelligence.

3.2.5. Ethical Considerations

Our Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved our study as an exempt human subjects inquiry. We minimized risk and safeguarded the privacy of student respondents by paraphrasing rather than using direct quotes, although the SET responses were anonymous. This approach helped us to prioritize confidentiality and transparency and was consistent with the requirements of our IRB.

Relatedly, we ensured ethical and responsible engagement with QDAS, including Dedoose and AILYZE. Not only do we disclose those details in this section by explicitly explaining how we used them, but we also affirm that we corroborated and refined things further with our human expertise as researchers to ensure scholarly integrity and methodological trustworthiness.

3.2.6. Analytic Precision

Our multi-tiered, multi-round, and iterative analytic processes facilitated a synthesized interpretation that forms the core of the findings presented in this manuscript. To protect confidentiality and foreground analytic patterns, we present findings on Black women and Black men instructors through composite representations. This approach allows us to examine how gendered expectations are reflected in SET, while preserving the complexity of individual experiences and the collective nature of the analytic insights.

4. Results

In accordance with IRB requirements prohibiting the use of direct quotations, the results are presented through paraphrased representations of students’ evaluative perspectives. While this approach may limit the referential specificity of individual comments, it enables the identification of broader evaluative patterns that are both analytically illuminating and necessary for ongoing research and discourse on SET and equalities in higher education. To further support interpretation, we include select single-word or brief phrase exemplars that reflect commonly recurring evaluative language. Our analysis revealed nuanced yet distinct patterns in how instructional quality was described, highlighting both shared evaluative criteria and systematic divergences in perceptions of teaching effectiveness, engagement, and mentorship.

4.1. Women Instructors as Caring Mentors

Collectively, these findings demonstrate how women instructors’ student evaluations reflect gendered expectations consistent with RCT. Positive evaluations frequently hinge on alignment with communal traits such as care, approachability, and emotional labor, structuring the conditions under which instructional authority becomes evaluatively legible. At the same time, the findings reveal constrained forms of counter-mapping, through which women instructors expand these roles by embedding rigor, authority, and advanced pedagogical design within relationally framed practices. Rather than an absence of role incongruity, the data suggest a negotiated dynamic in which instructional excellence is rendered legible through gender-congruent cues. Together, these patterns underscore asymmetrical evaluative standards, wherein women’s faculty excellence is recognized within constrained boundaries, even as their pedagogical practices quietly contest and broaden dominant assumptions about legitimate academic authority. See Table 1.

Table 1. Role congruity and counter-congruity mapping of paraphrased SETs for women instructors.

Paraphrased Student Feedback	Gender-Typed Expectations Reflected	RCT Alignment	Counter-Mapping: Subtle Resistance or Expansion of Role
Engaging, inspiring, empowering, challenging, and professionally poised instructor.	Communal warmth is paired with controlled authority.	Role congruity is maintained by balancing agentic challenge with feminine-coded dignity.	Normalizes women’s authority in rigorous coursework, expanding the range of acceptable leadership norms.
Authentic care and commitment to teaching and service.	Reinforcement of communal and nurturing expectations.	Congruity reinforcement yields positive evaluations centered on relational labor.	Frames care as pedagogically intentional rather than remedial.
Significant learning with flexibility and creativity.	Competence is acknowledged when paired with accommodation.	Conditional acceptance of expertise is aligned with flexibility.	Demonstrates rigor coexisting with adaptive pedagogy.
Opportunities for creative and expansive thinking.	Intellectual rigor softened through creativity.	Agentic rigor rendered acceptable through non-threatening framing.	Repositions creativity as a vehicle for rigor.
Professionalism, compassion, grace, and collaborative meaning-making.	Expectation of emotional labor and shared authority.	Gendered expectations for relational pedagogy.	Reframes authority as distributed expertise without loss of legitimacy.
Welcoming and engaging learning climate.	Foregrounding of approachability and accessibility.	Aligns with feminine-coded likability expectations.	Leverages warmth to sustain intellectual investment.
Highly organized, thorough, and responsive course design.	Competence is framed through service orientation.	Gender-congruent recognition of organizational skill.	Asserts instructional authority through course architecture.
Formative assessments supporting challenging material.	Rigor legitimized through scaffolding and care.	Mitigates role incongruity by softening difficulty.	Positions assessment as intellectually demanding and developmental.
The instructor excels in the faculty role.	Excellence is affirmed within teaching-care boundaries.	Confirms constrained evaluative pathways.	Pushes beyond narrow definitions of faculty success.

4.2. Men Instructors as Rigorous Innovators

Student evaluations of men instructors strongly reflect patterns aligned with RCT, where agentic traits such as leadership, intellectual authority, confidence, and challenge align seamlessly with masculine role expectations and are rewarded without penalty. Communal behaviors—such as care, compassion, and relational engagement—are interpreted as additive strengths rather than obligatory labor, enhancing rather than constraining perceptions of competence. Unlike women instructors, men’s deviations from traditional pedagogy or inclusion of expressive and relational practices are framed as innovation, charisma, or mentorship. These findings highlight asymmetrical evaluative standards in SETs, in which men benefit from broader, more flexible pathways to positive evaluation, reinforcing structural advantages in faculty assessment and professional recognition (see Table 2).

Table 2. Role congruity and counter-congruity mapping of paraphrased SETs for men instructors.

Paraphrased Student Feedback	Gender-Typed Expectations Reflected	RCT Alignment	Counter-Mapping: Subtle Resistance or Expansion of Role
The instructor consistently encouraged students and motivated them to develop as leaders.	Agentic leadership, confidence, and motivational authority.	Substantial role congruity between masculinity and leadership expectations.	Encouragement framed as collective development rather than dominance.
Students enjoyed innovative and alternative instructional approaches.	Creativity interpreted as confident experimentation.	Pedagogical deviation interpreted positively due to assumed competence.	Innovation normalized without the penalties typically faced by women.
The instructor was described as exceptionally caring and attentive to student progress.	Care framed as admirable rather than obligatory.	Communal behaviors enhance evaluations without undermining authority.	Care augments leadership image rather than constraining it.
Students emphasized the instructor’s charisma, style, and aspirational presence.	Charisma and personal style are linked to status and credibility.	Extra-role traits amplify positive evaluations that are not relevant to pedagogy.	Non-instructional traits elevate persona rather than distract from competence.
The instructor was praised for intellectual rigor, truth-telling, and poetic engagement.	Agentic intellectual authority and expressive confidence.	Congruity between masculinity and academic challenge yields strong evaluations.	Expressiveness framed as depth rather than emotional labor.
The instructor is described as a scholar-practitioner who pushes critical thinking.	Expertise and challenge aligned with masculine competence norms.	Role congruity reinforces perceptions of legitimacy and rigor.	Practice-based scholarship broadens models of masculine authority.
Students valued a compassionate and co-constructive classroom culture.	Care is interpreted as strength rather than a role obligation.	Communal behaviors add to, rather than replace, competence perceptions.	Demonstrates flexibility in masculine role enactment.
The instructor explained complex concepts clearly and demonstrated deep knowledge.	Expertise and clarity are strongly associated with masculine authority.	High congruity between gender role and instructional competence.	No need for mitigation through warmth to validate expertise.
The instructor challenged students to think critically and improve.	Directive challenge normalized and celebrated.	Role congruity supports positive reception of pressure and rigor.	Challenge framed as mentorship rather than threat.

4.3. Comparative Insights: Passionate Communicative Instructors

While students expressed appreciation for engagement, communication, and critical thinking across instructors, the qualitative framing of these attributes differed markedly by gender, with leadership and intellectual challenge emphasized for men and relational support emphasized for women. The side-by-side comparison reveals pronounced asymmetries in how gendered role expectations structure student evaluations. Consistent with RCT, women instructors’ positive evaluations are contingent upon careful alignment with communal norms, requiring authority and rigor to be softened through care, flexibility, and relational labor. In contrast, men instructors benefit from automatic alignment between masculine norms and expectations of leadership, intellectual authority, and challenge. Importantly, behaviors such as compassion, creativity, and pedagogical innovation function asymmetrically: for women, they are necessary to legitimize competence, whereas for men they operate as value-added enhancements. These findings underscore how SETs reproduce structural inequities by granting men broader evaluative latitude while constraining the terms under which women’s instructional excellence is recognized. See Table 3.

Table 3. Comparison of role congruity patterns in SET for women and men instructors.

Dimension	Women Instructors: SET Patterns	Men Instructors: SET Patterns	Role Congruity Interpretation
Instructional Authority	Authority is acknowledged when paired with warmth, dignity, and care.	Authority assumed and celebrated through challenge and leadership.	Women’s authority is conditional; men’s authority is role-congruent and unsubstantiated.
Care and compassion	Care is expected and central to positive evaluations.	Care is viewed as an added strength.	Communal labor is obligatory for women but optional—and rewarded—for men.
Intellectual Rigor	Rigor legitimized through scaffolding and flexibility.	Rigor was normalized and praised without mitigation.	Women must soften rigor to avoid penalties; men need not.
Pedagogical Innovation	Creativity is framed as supportive and relational.	Innovation is framed as confident experimentation.	Identical practices are interpreted differently based on gender expectations.
Course Organization	Organization linked to responsiveness and service.	Organization is linked to competence and professionalism.	Women’s competence is relationally framed; men’s is assumed.
Student Engagement	Engagement is rooted in approachability and a welcoming atmosphere.	Engagement rooted in charisma and inspiration.	Different affective pathways lead to positive evaluations.
Evaluation Breadth	Excellence is recognized within narrow, gender-typed bounds.	Excellence is recognized across a broad range of behaviors.	Men benefit from wider evaluative latitude in SETs.

5. Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine qualitative, open-ended feedback to uncover nuanced patterns in language, tone, and evaluation, with particular attention to how Black instructors are described and critiqued across gender. The following discussion interprets the study’s findings through the lens of theory and prior research to illuminate how gendered and cisnormative assumptions shape qualitative SET. Although prior quantitative analyses of SET data, such as those by Li and Benton (2017), have found minimal gender differences in averaged teaching effectiveness scores, our qualitative analysis reveals how gendered, specifically cisnormative, expectations surface in students’ open-ended evaluations—suggesting that numerical metrics alone can obscure meaningful patterns in how instructional excellence is articulated and made legible.

5.1. Interpreting Gendered Patterns in SET Through RCT

Interpreting the findings from the present study through RCT (Eagly & Karau, 2002) provides a useful framework for understanding how gendered expectations influence students’ qualitative evaluations of teaching. RCT posits that individuals are evaluated more favorably when their behavior aligns with socially prescribed role expectations and more critically when perceived deviations occur. In academic contexts, this framework helps explain how student assessments may reflect culturally embedded assumptions about authority, competence, and relationality rather than instructional quality alone.

Consistent with prior research applying RCT to student evaluations (Aragón et al., 2023; Mengel et al., 2019; Renström et al., 2021), students in this study described women instructors using language emphasizing care, mentorship, and approachability, while men instructors were more often characterized as authoritative, intellectually rigorous, and dynamic. These distinctions mirror culturally gendered role expectations and illustrate how students interpret teaching behaviors through implicit schemas rather than neutral criteria.

Importantly, these patterns emerged even though the evaluation instruments did not solicit information about instructors’ sex or gender, nor did students explicitly reference such categories. This finding suggests that gendered expectations operate implicitly within evaluative processes (Khokhlova et al., 2023), shaping how instructors are framed and assessed without overt acknowledgment. In this way, the findings extend prior research by demonstrating how role expectations surface in qualitative commentary through language and tone, rather than solely through numerical ratings or experimental manipulation.

Extending this interpretation, the findings suggest that role congruity operates not only by shaping evaluative language but by structuring the conditions under which instructional authority is rendered acceptable. For women instructors, positive evaluations appeared contingent upon a careful balancing of agentic rigor with feminine-coded relationality and dignity. Instructional challenge was frequently framed as acceptable when softened through flexibility, approachability, or evidence of relational labor, indicating that authority was conditionally granted when aligned with gender-congruent expectations. In this way, evaluations of women’s teaching reflected constrained pathways to legitimacy, in which competence was recognized but often filtered through non-threatening or likable framing, illustrating constrained forms of expansion within dominant evaluative schemas.

In contrast, men instructors benefited from a high degree of role congruity between masculinity and culturally embedded expectations of leadership and academic authority. Pedagogical rigor and pressure were interpreted as markers of competence rather than potential liabilities, and deviations from traditional authority—such as communal or supportive behaviors—tended to amplify evaluations without undermining perceptions of expertise. These patterns suggest that role congruity for men operates as a reinforcing mechanism, supporting broad interpretive latitude and presuming legitimacy even when instructional approaches vary. Importantly, this evaluative flexibility did not signal the absence of gendered expectations but instead reflected the greater latitude afforded to masculinity within prevailing role schemas.

Although overall assessments of instructional effectiveness converged across gender, this convergence obscures the unequal evaluative labor required to achieve similar recognition. Women’s effectiveness was often affirmed through gender-congruent framing that mitigated potential role incongruity, whereas men’s effectiveness appeared structurally supported by alignment between gender role and instructional authority. Thus, gender shaped not whether excellence was acknowledged, but the evaluative pathways through which it became legible.

5.2. Cisnormativity and Implicit Gendering in Student Evaluations

Although instructors’ sex or gender identities were neither disclosed to students nor solicited by evaluation instruments, students’ qualitative comments nonetheless reflected gendered assumptions aligned with dominant cisnormative expectations. These findings suggest that cisgender norms operate implicitly within student evaluations, shaping not only how instructors are perceived and described, but also the conditions under which authority, rigor, and care are rendered intelligible—even in the absence of explicit identity markers.

Prior scholars have documented differential gender evaluation patterns among faculty (Aragón et al., 2023; Kreitzer & Sweet-Cushman, 2021; Mengel et al., 2019), but often without explicitly interrogating cisgenderism as an organizing evaluative framework. This study extends that work by demonstrating how cisgender assumptions are reflected in language, tone, and emphasis in qualitative student commentary. Rather than functioning as neutral reflections of teaching, SETs operate as discursive sites where gender is interpreted and reproduced.

These findings also highlight the limits of neutrality by omission. Although evaluation instruments may appear sex- or gender-neutral, evaluative processes remain embedded within cultural schemas that privilege dominant forms of gender expression. Recognizing this dynamic is crucial for understanding how ostensibly inclusive evaluation systems may still perpetuate inequities.

5.3. SET as a Diagnostic of Evaluative Systems

The findings of this study suggest that student evaluations of teaching function not only as assessments of instructional effectiveness but also as diagnostic indicators of broader cultural and institutional norms. As a “troubleshoot test of the entire system” (Beyoncé, 2022), SETs reveal how judgments of teaching are filtered through persistent assumptions about authority, competence, and approachability. Importantly, what SETs diagnose is not simply the presence of bias, but an evaluative system in which legitimacy is differentially presumed or conditionally granted depending on alignment with dominant gender norms. Viewed in this way, SETs function less as neutral measures of instructional quality and more as diagnostics of evaluative systems that normalize unequal costs of legitimacy.

Although the evaluation instruments analyzed did not solicit information about instructors’ sex or gender, gendered interpretations nonetheless permeated the qualitative data. This disjuncture underscores the limits of procedural neutrality: even when identity is not explicitly invoked, social meaning-making remains central to evaluative practices. Viewed in this way, SETs function less as neutral measures of instructional quality and more as diagnostics of evaluative systems that normalize unequal costs of legitimacy under the guise of objectivity.

5.4. Implications for Teaching Evaluation and Educational Equalities

The findings of this study underscore important implications for how student evaluations of teaching are interpreted and used in higher education. Despite being treated as neutral indicators of instructional quality, SETs remain shaped by gendered and cisnormative assumptions that influence how teaching is framed and evaluated. Institutions should therefore exercise caution in relying on SET, including the qualitative student commentary as unmediated evidence of instructional effectiveness.

Therefore, we offer a few recommendations for departmental-, institutional-, and individual-level shifts. These include:

• Departmental-level shifts: Department Chairs and tenured faculty, particularly from privileged normative identities, who are involved in decision making must be attentive to their positionalites, including their own gender, those of the students being served, and the gender of faculty who are minoritized, especially tenure-track and contingent faculty. This positional attunement will enable departmental considerations of teaching effectiveness that contextualizes the qualitative comments (and scores) from SET by considering gender biases and cisnormativity.
• Institutional-level shifts: Institutions need to provide intentional socialization opportunities for first-year undergraduate and graduate students as well as tenured and tenure-track faculty around key indicators of instructional effectiveness so that students’ feedback, faculty reviews, and other commentary about teaching provide clear insights about what works pedagogically, andragogically, and for professional learning and growth. This would provide a common language that may control for gender stereotypes and other commentary unrelated to high quality impact teaching by focusing more directly on teaching. Everyone would benefit from learning how to provide and receive constructive feedback that will be helpful, for example, not gendered, superlative, or harmful.
• Individual-level shifts: Students are encouraged to provide more precise feedback that will help faculty. For example, provide instructors with concrete insights that will reinforce effective practices and help make instructional changes, not perpetuate gender stereotypes through broad strokes, whether in unfavorable or positive qualitative commentary.

Critically, equity-oriented and equality-enabling transformations of teaching evaluation must move beyond technical adjustments to survey design and address the interpretive frameworks through which evaluations are read and acted upon. Review processes that fail to account for gendered and cisnormative patterns in student feedback risk reproducing inequities, particularly when narrative comments carry weight in high-stakes decisions. Without such recognition, institutions risk treating convergent evaluation outcomes as evidence of fairness while obscuring the unequal relational and affective labor required to achieve comparable evaluations. Greater emphasis on multiple measures of teaching effectiveness and structured guidance for interpreting SET data will help mitigate these risks.

Importantly, these findings should not be read as evidence that individual instructors can counteract inequitable evaluative systems through pedagogical strategy alone, but rather as further indication that such systems require structural transformations. More broadly, the findings highlight how neutrality by omission is insufficient to disrupt entrenched norms. As institutions articulate commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, attention to how evaluative systems implicitly privilege specific identities and expressions is essential. Without such attention, SETs may continue to function as sites where inequities are subtly reproduced rather than challenged.

5.5. De/Limitations

Several de/limitations should be considered when interpreting the findings of this study. First, the analysts focused exclusively on qualitative, open-ended student comments rather than numerical SET scores. While this approach allowed for close examination of language, tone, and interpretive patterns, it does not permit direct comparison with quantitative rating differential analyses reported in prior research.

Second, the study examined SETs for cisgender Black faculty within a single institutional context. Institutional culture, disciplinary norms, and student demographics may shape evaluative practices differently across contexts. While the findings are not statistically generalizable, the study aims for transferability by providing theoretically grounded analysis and contextual detail that may inform understanding of SETs in similar institutional contexts.

Third, the evaluation instruments did not solicit information about students’ own identities, precluding analysis of how student positionality may interact with evaluative language. Finally, although this study identifies cisnormative patterns in evaluative language, it did not include faculty who identify as transgender, nonbinary, or gender-non-conforming. This limitation reflects constraints in available data rather than a lack of relevance and underscores the need for future research centered on gender-diverse faculty.

6. Conclusions

This study demonstrates that SETs are not merely assessments of instructional quality but sites where gendered and cisnormative assumptions are reproduced through evaluative language. Even in the absence of explicit references to sex or gender, student commentary reflects socially produced expectations that shape how authority, relationality, and instructional style are interpreted. Drawing on RCT, this study extends prior research on SET by showing how implicit norms operate discursively rather than solely through categorical bias. Notably, while both women and men instructors were consistently recognized as effective, differences in how their teaching was described reveal that gender shapes the framing of excellence rather than its recognition.

At the same time, the similarity in overall recognition of effectiveness across women and men instructors may suggest that students attribute value to comparable instructional qualities, even as those qualities are interpreted through gendered frames. The findings, therefore, do not indicate differential valuation of excellence, but rather differential discursive construction of that excellence. Moreover, this study does not examine how instructors themselves may enact or negotiate gendered expectations within cisnormative institutional contexts. It is possible that both students and faculty operate within shared normative frameworks that shape how authority, care, rigor, and relationality are performed and perceived. Future research that integrates observational or self-report data from instructors could further illuminate how gender, performance, and evaluation practices interact.

Taken together, these cisgender(ed) insights, in conversation with an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, underscore the continued necessity of “troubleshoot tests” of evaluative systems such as SETs. Such tests make visible indicators of institutional (in)equalities and epistemic (in)justice embedded within ostensibly neutral faculty evaluation practices.

Advancing educational equalities, therefore, requires not only methodological refinement but also sustained attention to the cultural [and normative] assumptions that shape how teaching is perceived, valued, and rewarded in higher education. In this way, contemporary efforts to foster educational equalities in higher education must also include robust attention to—and redress of—the educational inequalities embedded within the broader system of student evaluations of teaching.