Gender Stereotypes in the Text of Teaching Excellence Submissions

Updated Sep 07, 2026

Teaching-award nominations can reveal gendered expectations as well as praise. Kathryna Kwok and Jacqueline Potter examined 418 nominations from two award rounds at one English university. They used thematic coding in NVivo and chi-square tests to compare patterns by student and teacher gender.

Students more often nominated teachers of their own gender. Male students were disproportionately less likely to nominate women. Supportiveness and availability were mentioned less often than expected in men’s nominations of male teachers.

A correction matters here: the paper describes a slight male pattern for “Engaging”, not the female pattern previously reported on this page. That theme’s distribution was not statistically significant. See the published paper, Results and Table 1.

The authors interpret the findings through shifting standards theory: stereotypes can affect the standards people use. Their observational analysis does not show that adopting a particular teaching style causes more nominations. Gender was inferred in binary categories; ambiguous cases were excluded. The open-ended nominations also limited tests of the theory’s specific mechanisms.

Questions for an awards review

For institutions, our practical suggestion is to examine both who receives recognition and which qualities are praised. A review could ask whether its criteria give enough attention to teaching practice, whether nomination routes reach different student groups, and how reviewers distinguish an observation from an assumption about a teacher.

These are questions to investigate locally, not interventions evaluated by this paper. Student evaluation evidence and non-response patterns offer useful related reading.

Evidence and correction

Correction, 7 September 2026: Checked against the full published paper. We corrected the direction and significance of the “Engaging” finding, replaced a speculative account of the analysis with the documented method, and separated background literature from the study’s results. The study covers one university and does not directly measure teaching effectiveness.

Reference

Kwok, K. and Potter, J. (2022; first published online 2021). Gender stereotyping in student perceptions of teaching excellence: applying the shifting standards theory. Higher Education Research & Development, 41(7), 2201–2214. DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2021.2014411.