This Simple Trick Can Help Eliminate Gender Bias in Performance Ratings
Unconscious bias sneaks up on you. In medicine, it can be deadly, but in other fields, it can kill careers.
We’ve long known that university students favor male professors and rate them higher than female professors. While you can argue that overall men tend to be better professors than women, there was a strong suggestion that some unconscious bias was at play. (Additionally, I don’t think students are actually the best judge of a professor’s performance, but that’s a topic for a different day.)
A large American university changed their ratings from a 10 point scale to a 6 point scale for reasons unrelated to gender bias. Researchers Lauren Rivera is an Associate Professor of Management & Organizations at Kellogg School of Management and András Tilcsik is an associate professor at the Rotman School of Management thought this was the perfect data set to look at bias.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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