2019/02/13 by Yanan Fan, Laura J. Shepherd, Eve Slavich +4 · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Medicine · #Evaluation of Teaching Practices #Accounting Education and Careers #Innovations in Educational Methods #Workforce #Promotion (chess) #Race (biology) #Gender bias #Cultural bias #Prejudice (legal term) #Inequality #Hierarchy #Representation (politics) #Higher education #Psychology #Population #Underrepresented Minority #Demographic economics #Social psychology #Political science #Sociology #Gender studies #Medical education #Medicine #Demography #Economics #Law
paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0209749
openalex publication_date 2019/02/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
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, 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