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. 2023 Winter;22(4):ar52. doi: 10.1187/cbe.23-03-0041

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© 2023 V. S. Farrar et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2023 The American Society for Cell Biology. “ASCB®” and “The American Society for Cell Biology®” are registered trademarks of The American Society for Cell Biology.

This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 4.0 Unported Creative Commons License.

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FIGURE 2. — Performance gaps associated with gender in upper-division physiology are greater than those in lower division introductory biology and what might be expected based on prior academic performance. (A) On average, men (dark) received significantly higher course grades compared with women (light) across all offerings of human physiology (two-sample t test, p < 0.001, n = 13,184). (B) The overall average difference in course grades between men and women was larger in upper-division physiology compared with lower division introductory biology for students for whom grade data were available for both courses (difference in average grades in lower division (W–M): –0.13 ± 0.02, upper division –0.22 ± 0.02, n = 9,735). (C) When examining actual letter grades received, men were more likely to receive As and Bs than women, but less likely to receive Cs, Ds, and Fs (chi-squared test of independence, all p < 0.001). (D) Across the 10-year study period, men (dark circles) consistently showed higher grades on average than women (light triangles). Each point is the average of 3–5 offerings of the course. (E) The model-estimated effect of being a woman on course grade is largest when an interaction between prior overall GPA and being a woman is included. Bars represent model estimates and standard errors produced by multilevel models including only the fixed variables listed on the x axis, along with course offering as a random effect. (F) In all but one offering (each circle/square is an offering), women received lower average grades than men (data in top half of plot). In 46% of course offerings, women received lower grades on average than men, but entered the course with a higher prior GPA on average (upper-left gray quadrant); of these, eight offerings had a significant difference in grades between men and women (two sample t test, p < 0.05). There were no offerings where men entered the course with a higher average prior GPA and left the course with a lower grade than women (bottom-right quadrant). The dashed line represents the 1–1 line. Circles represent offerings where men and women’s average grades were significantly different (p < 0.05), while squares represent offerings where the observed difference was not statistically significant. In all cases, error bars represent standard error of the mean (SEM). In figure: *** p < 0.001.