How should gender discrimination and systemic disadvantage be addressed when more discriminatory and less generous students systematically sort into certain fields, courses, and instructors' sections? In this paper, we estimate measures of gender bias and evaluation generosity at the student level by examining the gap between how a student rates male and female instructors, controlling for professor fixed effects. Accounting for measurement error, we find significant variation in gender bias and generosity across students. Furthermore, we uncover that bias varies systematically by gender and field of study and that patterns of sorting are sufficiently large to place female faculty at a substantive disadvantage in some fields and male faculty at a disadvantage in others. Finally, we document that sexist attitudes are predictive of gender-based sorting and propose Empirical Bayes inspired measures of student-level bias to correct for instructor-specific advantages and disadvantages caused by sorting.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.