Teachers who claim gender equality may show bias against girls, study suggests

Math teachers who believe women no longer face discrimination tend to be biased against girls’ ability in math, according to an experiment conducted with over 400 math teachers across the United States, as The 74 reported. The findings were published in a peer-reviewed article that appeared in April 2023 in the International Journal of STEM Education.

In this experiment, teachers were asked to evaluate a set of student solutions to math problems. The teachers didn’t know that gender and race specific names, such as Tanisha and Connor, had been randomly assigned to the solutions. The idea was to see if the teachers had any unconscious biases, as The 74 reported.

After the teachers evaluated the student solutions, they were asked questions about their beliefs and experiences. Teachers who believe that society has achieved gender equality tended to rate a student’s ability higher when they saw a male name than when they saw a female name for the same work.