Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 14; no. 5; p. e0216241
• Main Authors: Peterson, David A M, Biederman, Lori A, Andersen, David, Ditonto, Tessa M, Roe, Kevin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 15-05-2019; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Analysis; Bias; Biology and Life Sciences; Discrimination; Educational evaluation; Evaluation Studies as Topic; Faculty; Female; Gender; Higher education; Human bias; Humans; Hypotheses; Language; Male; People and Places; Political science; Politics; Practice; Prejudice; School enrollment; Sex discrimination; Sexism; Sexism - prevention & control; Sexism - statistics & numerical data; Sexist education; Social psychology; Social Sciences; Stereotypes; Student evaluation; Students; Teacher evaluation; Teacher evaluations; Teachers; Teaching; Teaching - standards; Women; United States > US; Iowa
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0216241

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.