Abstract
Women continue to be underrepresented in academia, as well as in the majority of STEM fields, despite ongoing efforts to narrow the gender gap across various industries, professions, and occupations. According to SheFigures (European Commission, 2021), women constitute only 33% of all researchers in Europe. This disparity is further highlighted by an AAUW report (American Association of University Women, 2023), which reveals that women predominantly occupy non-tenure-track lecturer and instructor roles across institutions, while also remaining underrepresented in top academic positions.
The gender gap in academia can be partly attributed to the gender bias in teaching evaluations: there is ample evidence in the literature that Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) results tend to favour male professors over female professors (Boring, 2016; Genetin et al., 2021; Ayllón, 2022). Given the detrimental effect that negative teaching evaluations can have on the progression of women in academia, there has been a growing body of research exploring the effectiveness of field interventions that can mitigate gender biases. Such interventions, often using randomization techniques, have effectively raised awareness among students regarding the existence of gender biases and have partly corrected them. Previous treatments have primarily involved emails or short scripts (Peterson, 2019; Boring and Philippe, 2020; Genetin et.al., 2021; Kogan et al., 2022).
This study conducts a field experiment at the University of Girona (UdG) with the objective of preventing gender-biased behaviours that can arise when students evaluate their professors. To define the treatment and control groups, we conduct a randomized controlled trial at the individual level stratified by gender. Our experimental design consists of sending treated students an email with a link to a video that they shall watch before answering the teaching questionnaire. We produced two different videos and therefore the design considers two treatment arms (Treatment 1 and Treatment 2). The first video contains an informative message about implicit biases and highlights their unintentional and unconscious nature. It ends by asking students to avoid prejudices or discriminatory behaviour. The second video contains a similar message but refers more directly to gender biases and also informs that the related literature has documented that male students have been found to be more biased against females professors than female students. The control group does not receive any treatment video. By relying on videos, we take advantage of the effectiveness of audio-visual tools.
Our research is expected to contribute to discussions surrounding gender bias in academia and to deliver valuable information to administrators in order to implement changes that improve the situation of women in academia. Specifically, we aim to promote fairness and equity in academic evaluations, enhance diversity and inclusion in academia, increase awareness and advocacy for gender equality, and generate a positive impact on career advancement opportunities for women. Additionally, we aim to propose novel strategies for developing more effective anti-bias interventions. Furthermore, we expect to demonstrate that anti-bias interventions can enhance students' awareness and willingness to change biased behaviour. This, in turn, will enable professors to receive more equitable evaluations based on the quality of their performance, without account of other factors.