Few college promotion and tenure committees look at responses to specific questions, however. They usually just review the overall rating, which appears on the surface to be unaffected by teacher gender. Male students tended to rate female faculty lower, while female students tended to rate female faculty higher on this question, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Thus, certain women professors may indeed receive ratings affected by their gender. First we must understand that in college teaching, males are the norm.
Men are professors, women are women professors.
Thus women are marked for gender in ways men are not. Indeed, students appear to respond to male professors in a uniform manner, regardless of their own gender. However, stereotyped expectations of men coincide with what we expect of professors. Research documents that people who violate expectations generally are rated more negatively than people who behave as expected. For example, separate studies led by Sheila Bennett and Anne Statham found that women professors are judged more negatively than males if they are not more interested in and available to students than male professors.