Abstract

Since Goldberg's influential study demonstrated an evaluative bias against women by showing that evaluation of the same article came out lower when attributed to a woman author compared to a man, many studies have adopted the experimental paradigm. The accumulated results are inconsistent, however, and a recent study using meta-analysis concluded that there is little evidence of gender-biased evaluations. The present study has two major purposes. The first is to examine if the western results in gender bias in evaluation is replicated in the Korean culture, and the second is to test the effects of gender schema and authoritarianism in evaluations. One hundred and forty-seven subjects answered a questionaire which included 4 articles attributed to male or female authors, the Korean Sex Role Inventory, and the authoritarianism scale. Overall, the results did not show any significant gender-bias in evaluations, replicating the results of previous studies. When the results were analyzed by groups differing in schema use, however, it was found that some people are indeed biased against women in their evaluations. For one of the four articles which deals with ambitions of the youths(masculine connotations), masculine sex-typed subjects and highly authoritarian subjects evaluated the article more highly when it was attributed to a man than a woman. Androgynous subjects and non-authoritarian subjects did not show any gender bias. These results suggest that it is yet premature to conclude that gender bias in evaluation does not exist any more. On the whole, it may be fading away gradually, but it is still alive and exerting its influence in a significant part of the population, namely those who use stereotyped schemas.