Udemy courses reflect the world we live in.  The most popular courses reflect the current lifestyle and career trends.  The most popular instructors reflect what we value nowadays in terms of entertainment and information dissemination.  We all live according to ratings and so do Udemy course instructors.

Over this past year, the media has been flooded with all kinds of headlines about the progress of women. This year a record number of women will be working in the US Congress. 2018 was dubbed the “Year of the Woman”.

We at Teachinguide got to thinking, “what does our data tell us, if anything, about how gender plays a role in Udemy courses?” 

Our Gender Analysis

We decided to have a little fun with our database and see what an analysis of Udemy course instructor gender showed.

looked at the relative percentages of various categories and topics taught by men vs. women.  We then looked at the differences in course length,  engagement, and ratings between men and women instructors. surprised by some of the insights we found.

In the article, we present some of the data and insights generated by our “gender analysis”. We attempt to propose some theories or conclusions about what the data tells us regarding instructor gender differences for Udemy courses.

Note:  The data and analysis presented hereafter in no way reflect or represent Udemy’s policies, procedures, or opinions. In no way is Udemy, its employees, or instructors using the platform liable for the contents herein. The contents of this article solely reflect the analysis and opinions of Teachinguide.

Percent of Udemy Courses Taught by Men vs. Women

As of December 2018, a whopping 77% of all Udemy courses were taught by male instructors – with just 23% of courses on Udemy taught by women.  The differences in some of the following course categories are staggering.

Male teachers taught over 80% of the Udemy courses within 51 subcategories out of the 134 subcategories we looked at.  A further 74 sub-categories were dominated by male instructors by a factor of between 51% and 79%.

What’s going on here?  We don’t know!   But if we had to take a stab at it, here would be our top 5 major lines of reasoning:

1. Technology/Software/Development courses are the most popular and numerous courses on Udemy. With just 20% of jobs in tech held by women, it follows that there would be a prevalence of men teaching Udemy courses in this field.

In one extreme example of male dominance in Udemy tech courses, not a single course of the 61 courses on Oracle is taught by a woman. We wondered if this has anything to do with the fact that Oracle is not to be found on Forbes’s list of Best Places for Women to Work 2018.

2. Women might be less inclined to film themselves and put that video online. Let’s face it, like it or not, society judges women more harshly than men on their appearance.  Women may be less apt or willing to put themselves on camera for 2 hours and risk judgment on their physical appearance. As we’ve mentioned in our most recent article,  in today’s world if you want to be an online instructor, you need to go on camera.

3. Women are too busy being online students! As this article and numerous other studies point out, women dominate the online learning space as students/learners.  There are many reasons for this – most relate to women trying to juggle raising a family, work, and career aspirations. So if women are busy learning online, there may not be much time for teaching online.

4. Just as in the real world, men tend to be the breadwinners. They are maybe generally more motivated to go out and develop passive or even active income through avenues such as teaching on Udemy.

5. Women are too busy teaching in actual physical classrooms. “Real life” teaching is by far dominated by women. So, women may simply not have the time nor the inclination to create courses online.

All that said, the truth is, we really don’t know why there is such a disparity between male and female instructors on Udemy.

Udemy Course Categories Dominated by Female Instructors

With such a low female representation on Udemy, it begs the question, “In what course categories do female instructors dominate, if at all?”  The following are the only sub-categories in which we found that females dominate.

While it may come as no surprise that these Udemy course categories are female-dominated, with the exception of Beauty and Make Up (hard to believe that 26 courses are taught by males!), even in the women-dominated categories their margin is small. Three of the six subcategories show female instructors just a tad above 50%.

Do Men or Women Make Longer Courses?

As we’ve mentioned in our previous blog on rankings, we know that course length is a factor in Udemy course ranking.   So, we looked at this factor as well.   Once again, men prevail with longer courses in EVERY course category – even for those categories for which women dominate some subcategories.

On average, Udemy courses taught by men are 3.3 hours long vs. 2.6 hours for courses taught by women.  Let’s look at some of the more extreme differences in course length.

The only reasoning that we can muster for this disparity is that subject area such as Development and Business which are dominated by male instructors are quite complex and presumably cover more information.  A course on Java will likely be more intense content-wise than a course on Beauty or Pet Training.

There may also be more intense competition in these male-dominated course categories, and hence a need to provide more “value” content-wise.

It could also have something to do with women being busy balancing work, family, career, education, etc. as we mentioned previously. They may simply have less time, in general, to devote to course creation.

Do Male and Female Course Ratings Reflect the “Offline” Reality?

Numerous studies have shown that female teachers receive largely more critical reviews and ratings than their (rare) male counterparts.  The theory is that in person, students cannot separate the whole person from criticism of the course content and methods and that generally in society we are more critical of females than males.

A recent 2018 study stated,  “Students tend to comment on a woman’s appearance and personality far more often than a man’s.  Women are referred to as ‘teacher’ [as opposed to professor] more often than men, which indicates that students generally may have less professional respect for their female professors.” Ouch. This has resulted in gender pay inequality offline. Does this hold true online as well?

Good news! Teachinguide data indicates that for online courses, it’s a different story.  For the approximately 280 subcategories that we looked at for purposes of comparing rankings, female Udemy instructor courses were rated equal to or higher than their male counterparts for about 180 (64%) of those courses.  And on average across all Udemy course categories, male and female ratings are similar – 3.7 for men and 3.6 for women.

Some extreme examples of female instructors ranking well above their male counterparts include:

Why is this?  We have three theories (and once again, they really are just theories):

1. Most of the subcategories where women were significantly rated higher than men were the “soft” skills categories reflecting fields in which we typically see women working in the “real” world. Marketing (i.e branding or social media), Design, Lifestyle, Photography (i.e. Portraits), Languages, Teacher Training, and Test Prep are a few. They may simply produce better content in these areas.

2. As mentioned previously women on average create shorter courses, which may promote more students finishing the course, thereby increasing the number of reviews. Even if a student doesn’t finish a course, they may have gotten through a higher percentage of the (shorter) course before leaving a review – which would also positively influence ratings.

3. Women are better at engagement. Engagement drives ratings. This brings us to our next analysis..

Are Men or Women Better at Online Course Engagement?

We found that on average, female instructors engage students better than male instructors. The average engagement score across all categories is 8.3 for women and 7.6 for men.

If we take some of the subcategories from our ratings examples above, here are the engagement scores:

Let’s face it, women are notoriously better communicators than men.  Women also dominate the Marketing/PR categories, so they know a thing or two about marketing a course through engagement tactics.

That said, because of the large number of male instructors on Udemy, there are many cases where men instructors outdo their female counterparts in engagement – but yet still receive lower average ratings.

We would attribute this to the fact that males tend to create longer courses than women, which helps engagement, but doesn’t necessarily improve ratings.

Bottom Line – Who Wins the Udemy Instructor Battle of the Sexes?

Well, to help answer this question, we summarize our main findings below.

On the surface, it appears that for now, male instructors “win” on Udemy.  Although we’ve proposed some theories for why this is – many of which reflect the reality of today’s world – one can’t help but wonder why such a disparity exists between male and female instructors on Udemy.

If you have any thoughts or ideas, please send them along, we’d love to hear from you!