Reducing discrimination in the field: Evidence from an awareness raising intervention targeting gender biases in student evaluations of teaching

How to reduce discrimination? Evidence from a field experiment in amateur soccer

“…Our findings are important for practice and future research as they show that, even though an intervention is well-intended and has been proven to be effective in another context (Boring and Philippe, 2021), it can have no or even a negative effect. Many organizations throughout the world have taken initiatives to fight discrimination.…”

“…In addition to encouragement, the email gives some information about current discrimination in amateur soccer, mentioning that studies have shown that pla ers ith foreig -sounding names are less likely to get a respo se he o ta ti g a lu for the first ti e . Providing such information about the prevalence of discrimination can be essentialas shown by Boring and Philippe (2021) because people are not always aware that they discriminate (Bertrand et al, 2005;Rooth, 2010). The NFF sent the email two weeks preceding the correspondence test.…”

“…Our paper is inspired by and contributes to a small but growing literature testing interventions to reduce discrimination using field experiments. The study that is closest to ours is Boring and Philippe (2021). They study the effects of a similar interventionan email that includes information about existing discrimination and an appeal not to discriminatebut in a different context, namely student evaluations in higher education.…”

Online Teaching and Gender Bias

“…In what follows, I assess the extent to which the results may differ by student gender, as previously documented in the literature (Boring, 2017;Boring et al, 2016;Boring & Philippe, 2021;Fan et al, 2019;Mengel et al, 2019). Panel C in Table 6 presents the results for separate regressions that considered both the gender of the lecturer and that of the student.…”

“…A number of studies have previously investigated gender bias in teaching evaluation, with the results always pointing in the same direction: female instructors are discriminated against in evaluations of their teaching (Boring, 2017;Boring et al, 2016;Boring & Philippe, 2021;Mengel et al, 2019;Wagner et al, 2016). 4 These studies found that differences in the teaching scores by gender cannot be explained by differences in teacher effectiveness, performance or skills.…”