The pregnancy drop: How teaching evaluations penalize pregnant faculty

Abstract

The “leaky pipeline” and the “maternal wall” have for decades described the loss of women in STEM and the barriers faced by working mothers. Of the studies examining the impact of motherhood or pregnancy on faculty in higher education, most focus on colleagues’ attitudes towards mothers; few studies explore pregnancy specifically, only a handful examine student evaluations in particular, and none include female faculty in engineering. This study is the first to compare student evaluations across fields from female faculty when they were pregnant against when they were not. Two scenarios were considered: (1) the lived experiences of faculty who taught classes while pregnant and while not pregnant and (2) an experiment in which students submitted teaching evaluations for an actress whom half the students believed was pregnant while the other half did not. Among faculty respondents, women of colour received lower scores while pregnant and these scores lowered further when women were in engineering and/or had severe symptoms. Depending on their demographics, students who participated in the experiment were awarded teaching evaluation scores that differed when they believed the instructor was pregnant. Findings suggest that in fields with fewer women, the maternal wall is amplified and there is a unique intersectional experience of it during pregnancy. These findings may be useful for Tenure and Promotion committees to understand and therefore account for pregnancy bias in teaching evaluations.