Do Business School Students Value Faculty Diversity? Insights from a Dyadic Analysis of Students’ Evaluations of Teaching

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Rankings and accreditations encourage business schools to be more diverse, notably regarding professor nationality and gender. At the same time, professors are expected to receive high student evaluations for their teaching. However, professors with certain diversity-relevant characteristics might be systematically disadvantaged when it comes to students’ evaluations of teaching. This research adopts a social categorization lens, which enables a thorough exploration of multiple relationships and their nuances. Using a proprietary sample of 377,504 business school student–professor dyads, we uncover findings that contribute to the seemingly conflicting results in the literature on diversity. This paper shows that students value international professors, such that the larger the cultural distance between professors and students, the higher the professors’ evaluations. The study also offers a more nuanced view regarding the gender bias debate. At younger ages, female professors receive lower evaluations than males. While an inverted U-shaped relation exists for female professors, with female professors receiving the highest evaluations close to the mid-point of age, male professors obtain lower evaluations with higher age. Finally, full-time professors, professors who give higher grades to students, and professors who are native speakers receive higher evaluations. The findings thus empirically corroborate the benefits of employing a diverse faculty.