The Impact of Gender on Researchers’ Assessment: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract Women remain underrepresented in Dentistry in academia, and this gap is widened whenever each career step is progressed. It is of utmost importance to investigate underlying associated factors to predict researchers’ assessment of their gender in Dentistry and the overall STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. Thus, we developed a randomized controlled trial to test whether women or men would be preferred with identical curriculum vitae (CV); and the impact of the career stage in the evaluators’ choice. To this, a simulated post-doctoral process was carried forward to be assessed for judgment. Level 1 and 2 Brazilian fellow researchers in the field of Dentistry were invited to act as external reviewers in a post-doctoral process and were randomly assigned to receive a female or male CV. They were required to rate the CV from 0 to 10 in scientific contribution, leadership potential, ability to work in groups, and international experience. For all categories of CVs evaluated, men received higher scores compared to the CVs from women. Robust variance Poisson regressions demonstrated that men were more likely to receive higher scores in all categories, despite applicants’ career stage. For example, CVs from men had nearly three quarters more likely to be seen as having leadership potential than equivalent CVs from women. Gender bias is powerfully prevalent in academia in the dentistry field, despite researchers' career stage. Actions like implicit bias training must be urgently implemented to avoid (or at least decrease) that more women are harmed.