Perception of Academics Wearing Hijab: A Comparison Study amongst Public Universities in Malaysia

Most female academics in Malaysian public universities wear a headscarf or hijab, one of the professional dress codes in the government sector. Concerning this, it is important to understand how the online background setting affects female academics wearing hijabs while they perform online teaching and learning. Studies in environmental psychology demonstrate that the attributes of a room influence individuals within that environment referred to as the ‘Product Effect’ approached and was utilised to assess if the online background setting influences the perceptions of female hijab and female non-hijab lecturers during online teaching amongst Malaysian public universities. In this study, 520 questionnaires were distributed via an online survey. Female lecturers model serves as subjects in the study, which uses online interior class background effects as a stimulus. The survey questions were mostly based on the Times Higher Education – QS World Universities Rankings assessment criteria, which include four themes: research and citation quality, teaching quality, industry revenue, and worldwide orientation. The data will be analysed using multivariate analysis of variance in SPSS software. Results demonstrate that gender is the factor among the two academicians with online background settings between female lecturers and female lecturers with hijabs in Malaysian Public Universities during online teaching. In addition, research demonstrated that students’ perceptions of female lecturers were the same whether they wore or did not wear a headscarf. Furthermore, these results potentially provide new knowledge to the field of environmental psychology, especially for academic attire or appearances during online teaching. Aside from that, this study will promote a better education online platform to satisfy the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2015-2025 for Higher Education and improve lecturer professionalism during online teaching to attain quality education through SDGs. The present approach of Room-Product-Effect may be used for the virtual interior room effect in the field of online environmental psychology.