Evaluator Status and Observed Gender Bias in Online Evaluations

Date: 

Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 4:00pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Room 1550

Tristan Botelho, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Yale School of Management

Although research has provided strong support for the positive effect of candidate status on evaluative outcomes, little is known about whether evaluator status affects evaluative outcomes. We argue that evaluator status attainment can help mitigate a significant issue in evaluation processes: observed gender bias. Specifically, we theorize that status attainment leads to a disciplining effect for evaluators leading them to rely less on factors that are unrelated to the quality of what they are
evaluating, here, gender. We leverage a quasi-natural experiment present in the restaurant industry and evaluations on the digital platform Yelp to test our theory. We find that when evaluators report having a female (versus male) server they rate the restaurant 45.1 percent lower than the restaurant's average rating to date. However, evaluator status attainment on the platform (receiving an “Elite” designation) attenuates this gender bias by 72.8 percent and closes the gender gap by 58.3 percent ex post, which cannot be explained by other evaluator characteristics, such as experience or selection. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating evaluator-level dynamics in the study of evaluations and suggest that evaluator status attainment is one pathway for redressing bias.