Browsing by Author "Steisel, Paula H."

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    The Influential Nature of Stereotypes in the Formation of Judgments: The Evaluation Bias
    (1995) Steisel, Paula H.; Cassidy, Kimberly Wright; Perloe, Sidney
    The evaluation bias occurs when the same piece of work is judged differently depending on the sex of the author or producer of the work. The purpose of this experiment was to see whether men and women rate articles differently depending upon the gender of the author of the article. This experiment was conducted to examine the effects of the gender of the author, the school environment, and the gender of the rater on evaluations of three different articles in a male dominated, female dominated, and neutral field. Subjects read three articles with a male author, female author, and author with an initial in the three fields. Subjects from a coeducational and all female college rated the articles on five different dimensions: writing style, competency of the author in the subject area, persuasiveness, depth of the article, and quality of the article. There was no evidence of the evaluation bias in our study. Overall effects between male and female raters resulted in a main effect of gender of the rater for the female article so that women evaluated the female domain more favorably than men. It was hypothesized that women at all female schools would be more aware of discriminatory behavior and evaluate articles authored by males and females equally. Results showed that women from an all female school rated the female author of a feminine article less favorably than the women from a coeducational school. Another hypothesis was based upon the centrality of gender where individuals who find gender to be central are more likely to see themselves as part of the in-group, the category of female and therefore rate other females as individuals rather than base the ratings on stereotypes of the category, female. Due to the few subjects who placed their gender on the Who am I? test, this hypothesis could not be tested in this experiment.