Gender and cultural bias in student evaluations: Why representation matters

Abstract

Gendered and racial inequalities persist in even the most progressive of workplaces.There is increasing evidence to suggest that all aspects of employment, from hiring to performance evaluation to promotion, are affected by gender and cultural background.In higher education, bias in performance evaluation has been posited as one of the reasons why few women make it to the upper echelons of the academic hierarchy.With unprecedented access to institution-wide student survey data from a large public university in Australia, we investigated the role of conscious or unconscious bias in terms of gender and cultural background.We found potential bias against women and teachers with non-English speaking backgrounds.Our findings suggest that bias may decrease with better representation of minority groups in the university workforce.Our findings have implications for society beyond the academy, as over 40% of the Australian population now go to university, and graduates may carry these biases with them into the workforce.Recently for example, a study of around 20,000 student evaluations over the period 2009-2013 from the school of Business and Economics, [11] at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, found that, on average, female instructors received a score 37 percentage points lower than male instructors.The bias is driven by male students, and is worst for junior female instructors.They also found the bias to be more obvious in courses which contain more

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