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.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Copyright Owner
Peterson et al.
Copyright Date
2019
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Peterson, David A. M.; Biederman, Lori A.; Andersen, David; Ditonto, Tessa M.; and Roe, Kevin J., "Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching" (2019). Political Science Publications. 79.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/pols_pubs/79
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.