Give teachers a physics test from a woman and they’ll give her worse grades

(credit: Flickr user Noticias UFM)

We saw yesterday that female scientists can face workplace difficulties as they advance through their careers. But all of those problems happen after the women have been through years of education, which can also be a challenge. A variety of surveys have found indications that stereotypes about women's capabilities in science and math influence expectations throughout their education.

But connecting these biases to actual educational problems can be challenging, but a Swiss researcher named Sarah Hofer has found a simple way to test these issues. Hofer provided a large panel of physics teachers with a single answer that was attached to either male or female biographical information and asked them to grade it. She found that tests with a female bio got significantly lower grades, at least from teachers who were early in their careers.

Hofer's approach was very simple. She told physics teachers in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany that she was doing a survey on their grading practices. They'd be given a physics question with an answer that required detailed reasoning in Newtonian mechanics, along with some information about a student and the student's answer.

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