Discrimination Happens When You Don’t Even Realize It
Researchers at North Carolina State conducted an experiment in which they asked students to rate teachers of an online course (the students never saw the teachers). To some of the students, a male teacher claimed to be female and vice versa.
When students were taking the class from someone they believed to be male, they rated the teacher more highly. The very same teacher, when believed to be female, was rated significantly lower.
Something similar happens with race.
Two scholars, Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, sent out fictitious résumés in response to help-wanted ads. Each résumé was given a name that either sounded stereotypically African-American or one that sounded white, but the résumés were otherwise basically the same.
The study found that a résumé with a name like Emily or Greg received 50 percent more callbacks than the same résumé with a name like Lakisha or Jamal. Having a white-sounding name was as beneficial as eight years’ work experience.
And Cass Sunstein on how this (presumably unconscious) discrimination by elementary school teachers deters girls from pursuing math and science.
some teachers showed a significant bias, whereas others showed none. Because students are randomly assigned to teachers within primary schools, Lavy and Sand were able to investigate the consequences, for both boys and girls, of having a biased primary school teacher.
The biased teachers turned out to have significant effects: Girls who had a biased teacher in primary school were less likely to continue with math and science in high school. In contrast, boys with biased teachers were more likely to complete the advanced math and science studies.
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Copyright 2015 Liberaland
By: Stuart Shapiro
Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.
2 responses to Discrimination Happens When You Don’t Even Realize It
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Robert M. Snyder February 24th, 2015 at 14:13
“The biased teachers turned out to have significant effects: Girls who had a biased teacher in primary school were less likely to continue with math and science in high school. In contrast, boys with biased teachers were more likely to complete the advanced math and science studies.”
Wait a minute! I thought we couldn’t have merit pay for teachers because it is impossible to measure performance. But these researchers claim to have measured the lasting effects of specific teachers on students years later. So is the research bogus, or can we really measure differences in teacher performance?
Robert M. Snyder February 24th, 2015 at 15:13
“The biased teachers turned out to have significant effects: Girls who had a biased teacher in primary school were less likely to continue with math and science in high school. In contrast, boys with biased teachers were more likely to complete the advanced math and science studies.”
Wait a minute! I thought we couldn’t have merit pay for teachers because it is impossible to measure performance. But these researchers claim to have measured the lasting effects of specific teachers on students years later. So is the research bogus, or can we really measure differences in teacher performance?