Does facial structure explain differences in student evaluations of teaching? The role of fWHR as a proxy for perceived dominance

Dominance is usually viewed as a positive male attribute, but this is not typically the case for women. Using a novel dataset of student evaluations of teaching in a school of Business and Economics of a selective university, we construct the face width-to-height ratio (fWHR) as a proxy for perceived dominance to assess whether individuals with a higher ratio obtain better evaluations. Our results show that a higher fWHR is associated with a better evaluation for male faculty, while the opposite is the case for female faculty. These results are not due to differences in teachers' quality or beauty. In terms of magnitude, the effect of the fWHR is much larger for female professors. To the extent that fWHR is a good proxy of perceived dominance, it appears that conformity to traditional gender norms pays off for both men and women. However, the cost of challenging these norms is much larger for women than for men.

Evaluation of gender trends in first authorship in nephrology publications in four major US journals in the last decade

BACKGROUND

To date, no data exist on gender-related publication biases in nephrology. This study was conducted to determine whether gender differences exist in the current literature published in high-ranking US nephrology journals, and how they may have changed over time.

METHODS

The PubMed search was performed using the easyPubMed package in R, which extracted all articles indexed in PubMed from 2011 to 2021 from the US nephrology journals with the highest impact factors, i.e., Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN), American Journal of Nephrology (AJN), American Journal of Kidney diseases (AJKD), and the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). Gender with predictions > 90% were accepted and the remaining were manually identified. Descriptive statistical analysis was carried out on the data.

RESULTS

We identified 11,608 articles. On average, the ratio of male to female first authors decreased from 1.9 to 1.5 (p < 0.05). Additionally, in 2011, women accounted for 32% of first authors, a number that rose to 40% in 2021. All but the American Journal of Nephrology showed a variation in the ratio of men to women first authors. For the JASN, the ratio changed from 1.81 to 1.58, p = 0.001, for CJASN, the ratio declined from 1.91 to 1.15, p = 0.005 and for AJKD, the ratio declined from 2.19 to 1.19, p = 0.002.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Our study shows that gender biases in publications continue to exist in first-author publications in high-ranking Nephrology journals published in the US; the gap is however closing. We hope this study lays the groundwork to continue following and evaluating gender trends in publication.