In this study I use data on grades awarded for bachelor and master theses at a large Polish university, seeking to identify discrimination on gender or physical attractiveness. I focus on the gap between the grades awarded by the advisor (who knows the student personally) and the reviewer (who typically does not, so that gender is less salient and beauty is not observable). This provides an excellent control for actual quality of the work, which is often problematic in previous literature. Observations on nearly 15 thousand students are available, of which 2500 also have their physical attractiveness rated and included in my analysis. I can thus check if the advisor-reviewer grade gap depends on student’s gender and beauty, also in interaction with their genders. Overall, there is no evidence of such influence.
Published version
Gender equality at the University
Despite clear progress in the last decades, women continue to experience limited access to top positions in the academia, at least in some fields of science. Our goal in this project is to deepen understanding of the mechanisms underlying gender inequality at the university. We hope to be able to confirm or disprove a few subtle ways in which progress of women in science may be hindered.
Using a number of research methods, including interviews, experiments and scientometric analysis we will try to uncover clichés that may negatively affect evaluation of women’s academic work.
We hope that our project will help researchers, university authorities and administrators of science and higher education understand ways in which they can provide more of a level playing field for both genders.
Project partners (from Poland and Norway) will collaborate to analyse existing data and design new studies of gender inequality at the academia. We believe in the long run our project will contribute to sharing best practices in promoting gender equality at the university between Norway, Poland, and beyond. Among other things, surveys previously administered in Norway and targeted at PhDs will be reanalysed and conducted in Poland as part of the project. We will try to learn from the comparison of the results in the two countries.
Czy i jak wielki jest wpływ steretypu naukowca-mężczyzny na kariery zawodowe kobiet naukowców, w tym także na to, jak prowadzone przez nie badania wpływają na otaczającą nas rzeczywistość?
@article{krawczyk2018gender,
title={Do gender and physical attractiveness affect college grades?},
author={Krawczyk, Micha{\l}},
journal={Assessment \& Evaluation in Higher Education},
volume={43},
number={1},
pages={151--161},
year={2018},
publisher={Routledge}
}