Do Evaluators Prefer Candidates of Their Own Gender?

Vincent Chandler

Canadian Public Policy, 2018, vol. 44, issue 4, 289-302

Abstract: Increasing the number of female evaluators could help female candidates if evaluators prefer candidates of their own gender. I study whether there is any evidence of such preferences with a unique data set containing 10,500 scores given by 105 evaluators to 3,500 students in the humanities and social sciences who applied for a doctoral scholarship. On average, I find very weak evidence of same-gender preferences for male evaluators (p = 0.133). To better understand this effect, I also study same-gender preferences across the distribution of candidates, in subcommittees with different gender composition, and for evaluators from different disciplines. I show that male evaluators give higher scores to strong male candidates relative to those given by female evaluators. At the same time, male evaluators give higher scores to male candidates than do female evaluators when there is only one male evaluator in the subcommittee. The representation of men in a discipline does not seem to affect the scores given by evaluators. Overall, there is no clear evidence that replacing a male evaluator with a female one would help female candidates.

Keywords: gender discrimination; gender quota; academia; doctoral candidates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cpp.2018-022 (text/html)
access restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpp:issued:v:44:y:2018:i:4:p:289-302

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.utpjournals.com/loi/cpp/

Access Statistics for this article

Canadian Public Policy is currently edited by Prof. Mike Veall

More articles in Canadian Public Policy from University of Toronto Press University of Toronto Press Journals Division 5201 Dufferin Street Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3H 5T8.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iver Chong ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).