Boys Are Falling Behind
An ingenious study explores grading bias against boys
Do teachers exhibit gender bias when grading students’ work? If so, in which direction does the bias go? Are teachers more likely to favor boys or favor girls?
These are the questions explored in a fascinating 2020 paper by Camille Terrier, published in the Economics of Education Review. Terrier compared children’s marks on gender-blind national exams with non-blind marks given by their teachers. The findings revealed a persistent marking bias in favor of girls. Although the effect wasn’t huge, Terrier found persuasive evidence that the bias contributes to boys falling behind in school.
Below are some excerpts from the paper. You can read the whole thing here for free.
Background
Boys are increasingly falling behind girls at school. This disadvantage has important consequences: boys who fall behind are at risk of dropping out of school, not attending college or university, and/or being unemployed. In OECD countries, 66% of women entered a university program in 2009, versus 52% of men, and this gap is increasing. In Europe, 43% of women aged 30–34 completed tertiary education in 2015, compared to 34% of men in the same age range. Because this gap has increased by 4.4 percentage points in the last ten years, there is a growing interest in identifying its roots.
Method
I use a rich student-level dataset… that follows 4490 pupils from grade 6 until grade 11. To quantify teachers’ gender biases in math and French, I exploit an essential feature of the data: it contains both blind and non-blind scores. An external grader without knowledge of student’s characteristics provides schools with blind scores. These scores are presumably free of teachers’ biases. Teachers provide non-blind scores for in-class exams… This data allows me to study the effect of teachers’ gender biases on pupils’ progress, schools attended, and course choices.
Quantifying Teacher Bias
[D]espite the commonly held belief that girls are discriminated against, teacher biases favor girls…
Figs. 1 and 2 display the distributions of blind and non-blind French scores at the beginning of grade 6… [G]irls’ average score is 0.434 points higher than boys when the score is blind and 0.460 when it is non-blind.
[T]he story is different in mathematics. Figs. 3 and 4 show that boys outperform girls when grades are blind, but the opposite is true when teachers assess their own pupils: girls’ average score at the beginning of grade 6 is 0.147 points lower than boys when the score is blind, but it is 0.170 points higher when the score is non-blind.
Knock-On Effects of Teacher Bias
This favoritism, estimated as individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts…
For two classes where the achievement gap between boys and girls would be identical in 6th grade, quasi-randomly assigning a teacher who is 1 SD more biased against boys to one of the classes decreases boys’ progress in that class relative to girls by 0.123 SD in math and by 0.106 SD in French. Over the four years of middle school, teachers’ gender bias against boys accounts for 6% of boys falling behind girls in math…
Moving to other outcomes, I find that having a teacher who is one SD more biased in math increases girls’ probability of selecting a scientific track in high school by 3.6 percentage points compared to boys’. Teachers’ average bias in math reduces the gender gap in choosing scientific courses by 12.5%…
If teachers’ biases are mainly driven by statistical discrimination, we might expect end-of-year grades to be less biased (and the variance to be smaller) because teachers acquire information about students during the year. On the other hand, if teachers’ biases are mainly taste based, bias should not change over time.1 In that case, end-of-year in-class grades should produce similar bias variance than first-semester grades. The mean and variance of the bias are very similar at the beginning of the year and at the end, suggesting that gender favoritism is mainly taste based.
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Related Reading From the Archive
Statistical discrimination happens when people treat others differently based on group averages rather than individual traits - like a teacher assuming that a boy struggles in reading because, on average, boys struggle more than girls. Taste-based discrimination, on the other hand, is driven by personal biases or preferences - like a teacher grading girls more generously simply because they prefer teaching them.
In law school, grading is blind. Perhaps that should be pushed down to lower levels of education.
There was a law review article some years ago in which a feminist argued that law school blind grading discriminated against women students because females did very slightly worse than their undergraduate grades would predict. She didn’t consider the possibility that undergraduate professors discriminated against guys.
Chimes with my experience many years ago. We felt that girls were given an easy ride by teachers. When we sat what used to be called GCE O levels where papers were marked externally by someone who had never met you and who knew nothing about you, our position relative to the girls changed. For me, it was a revelation and I never looked back. Boys today wouldn't get that experience because course based assessments count for more.