This Rating System Help Decrease Gender Bias
This Rating System Help Decrease Gender Bias
This small change to how we design rating systems may disrupt gender bias in the workplace.
When Nadia Comăneci scored a perfect 10 for her routine on the uneven bars at the 1976 Olympics, she made history.
No other gymnast had ever received such a pristine mark at the games, and she went on to earn six more of them–along with three gold medals–in Montreal that year.
Her dazzling performances and those perfect 10s have etched themselves into collective memory as a story of brilliance.
The stories of brilliance we tell ourselves in our everyday lives, at work, and especially in certain fields, however, tend to feature male protagonists.
And when it comes to performance reviews, men are far more likely to garner perfect 10s, and the women who work alongside them in the same roles are much less likely to see similar marks–even if they perform just as well by other measures.
So says research recently published in the American Sociological Review. But here’s the surprising part: When evaluations were based on a six-point scale rather than a 10-point scale, the gender gap virtually disappeared.
The results suggest that just a small change to how we design rating systems–even one as seemingly inconsequential as the number of possible ratings on a scale–could disrupt gender bias.
The study authors first looked at real teaching evaluations at an unnamed university in North America, which just so happened to transition from a 10-point scale to a six-point scale.
Before the change, male professors in male-dominated subject areas received top, or “10,” ratings in 31.4% of cases, compared to only 19.5% of cases for female professors. After the change, men and women received top, or “6,” ratings 41.2% and 42.7% of the time, respectively.
