Evidence Of Racial, Gender Biases Found In Faculty Mentoring : NPR: STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, when preschoolers get to college, some will have professors who take sustained interest in guiding them. This often happens because a student reaches out for a mentor. Now let's hear how that time-honored process suffers from bias.
Our colleague David Greene sat down with NPR's Shankar Vedantam.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
We should be clear of what we're talking about here. This is not professors who sort of help students acclimate to a university, give them directions. We're talking about professors who really invest in a student.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: That's right, David. And perhaps the most important thing is this is intellectual guidance. This is guidance to say: Here's how you should best use your skills.
GREENE: And what's the bias you found?
VEDANTAM: The bias has to do with how faculty seem to respond to these requests, David. Group of researchers ran this interesting field experiment. They emailed more than 6,500 professors at the top 250 schools pretending to be the students. And they wrote letters saying, I really admire your work. Would you have some time to meet? The letters to the faculty were all identical, but the names of the students were all different.
Let me read you some of the names and you can tell if you can pick up a pattern.
