Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching

Peterson, David A.M.; Biederman, Lori A.; Andersen, David; Ditonto, Tessa M.; Roe, Kevin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0216241

Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching

Peterson, David A.M.; Biederman, Lori A.; Andersen, David; Ditonto, Tessa M.; Roe, Kevin

Authors

David A.M. Peterson

Lori A. Biederman

Dr David Andersen david.j.andersen@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Dr Tessa Ditonto tessa.m.ditonto@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Kevin Roe

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.

Citation

Peterson, D. A., Biederman, L. A., Andersen, D., Ditonto, T. M., & Roe, K. (2019). Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. PLoS ONE, 14(5), Article e0216241. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216241

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Apr 15, 2019
Online Publication Date	May 15, 2019
Publication Date	2019
Deposit Date	Dec 5, 2019
Publicly Available Date	Oct 15, 2021
Journal	PLoS ONE
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	14
Issue	5
Article Number	e0216241
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216241

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2019 Peterson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.