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Economics Department Weekly Seminar | Puneet Arora | 14th October 2026 | 1:40 PM

Abstract: Policy interventions that disclose credentials, qualifications, or performance records are a common tool for reducing bias in evaluation, but whether all evaluators credit the same signal equally is rarely tested directly. I examine this in a randomized field experiment with 970 first-year MBA students at an Indian business school, who were randomly assigned to see either their instructor's name or a standardized profile with photograph, doctoral institution and professional record before completing a teaching evaluation. The credential signal reached male and female students equally: measures of information receipt show no gender gap in recall. The signal was credited unequally. Male students raised their evaluations of male instructors by 0.28 standard deviations in response to the credentials; female students evaluating the same male instructors did not update, creating a 0.34 standard deviation gap on the evaluation index. For female instructors, the two student genders responded similarly, and the asymmetry is not explained by stated beliefs about gendered access to academic careers. Whether making a signal visible is sufficient to produce an information intervention's intended effect, or whether the same signal is reinterpreted differently by different evaluators, has implications beyond classroom evaluations.