Gender bias in peer performance evaluations: evidence from a field experiment

Peer performance evaluations are an important determinant of hiring and promotion decisions, but how objective are they? To tackle this question, we measure gender bias in performance evaluations in a large course at a flagship public university. We exploit the random assignments of both peer evaluators and blinded official graders over several essay assignments, where they are incentivized to match official grades. We find that male peer graders assign higher scores to classmates without female-sounding names in content, but lower scores in writing style. Interestingly, we do not find such biases for female graders. Our findings highlight potential challenges of designing fair assessment practices.