Campus Units

Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Natural Resource Ecology and Management, Political Science

Document Type

Article

Publication Version

Published Version

Publication Date

5-15-2019

Journal or Book Title

PLoS ONE

Volume

14

Issue

5

First Page

e0216241

DOI

10.7910/DVN/AB4ZAV

Abstract

Student evaluations of teaching are widely believed to contain gender bias. In this study, we conduct a randomized experiment with the student evaluations of teaching in four classes with large enrollments, two taught by male instructors and two taught by female instructors. In each of the courses, students were randomly assigned to either receive the standard evaluation instrument or the same instrument with language intended to reduce gender bias. Students in the anti-bias language condition had significantly higher rankings of female instructors than students in the standard treatment. There were no differences between treatment groups for male instructors. These results indicate that a relatively simple intervention in language can potentially mitigate gender bias in student evaluation of teaching.

Comments

This article is published as Peterson, David A.M., Lori A. Biederman, David Andersen, Tessa M. Ditonto, and Kevin Roe. "Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching." PLoS One 14, no. 5 (2019): e0216241. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0216241. Posted with permission.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Copyright Owner

Peterson et al.

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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