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 the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
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