Assessing Group-level Gender Bias in Professional Evaluations: The Case of Medical Student End-of-Shift Feedback

Emmy Liu, Michael Henry Tessler, Nicole Dubosh, Katherine Hiller, Roger Levy


Abstract
Though approximately 50% of medical school graduates today are women, female physicians tend to be underrepresented in senior positions, make less money than their male counterparts and receive fewer promotions. There is a growing body of literature demonstrating gender bias in various forms of evaluation in medicine, but this work was mainly conducted by looking for specific words using fixed dictionaries such as LIWC and focused on global assessments of performance such as recommendation letters. We use a dataset of written and quantitative assessments of medical student performance on individual shifts of work, collected across multiple institutions, to investigate the extent to which gender bias exists in a day-to-day context for medical students. We investigate differences in the narrative comments given to male and female students by both male or female faculty assessors, using a fine-tuned BERT model. This allows us to examine whether groups are written about in systematically different ways, without relying on hand-crafted wordlists or topic models. We compare these results to results from the traditional LIWC method and find that, although we find no evidence of group-level gender bias in this dataset, terms related to family and children are used more in feedback given to women.
Anthology ID:
2022.gebnlp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, Washington
Editors:
Christian Hardmeier, Christine Basta, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Gabriel Stanovsky, Hila Gonen
Venue:
GeBNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
86–93
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.gebnlp-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.gebnlp-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emmy Liu, Michael Henry Tessler, Nicole Dubosh, Katherine Hiller, and Roger Levy. 2022. Assessing Group-level Gender Bias in Professional Evaluations: The Case of Medical Student End-of-Shift Feedback. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP), pages 86–93, Seattle, Washington. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing Group-level Gender Bias in Professional Evaluations: The Case of Medical Student End-of-Shift Feedback (Liu et al., GeBNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.gebnlp-1.11.pdf