THE LANGUAGE WE USE TO DESCRIBE MALE AND FEMALE CADETS AT THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY

摘要

The United States Military Academy (USMA) uses Periodic Development Reviews (PDRs) as a systematic means for evaluating the leader development of individual cadets within the Corps of Cadets. PDRs provide developmental feedback to the cadet from various evaluators (instructors, peers, subordinates, and superiors) at various times throughout their 47-month experience to aid the cadet in developing a self-improvement plan to maintain noted strengths and to improve areas of deficiency. Evaluators assess cadets based on character, presence, intellect, leadership qualities, and development skills by using a 5-point rating scale ranging from unsatisfactory to exceptional and then by providing comments related to the evaluated attribute. Recent research has found that success and failure in each gender is often described using different adjectives. Typically, men are described as technical and logical while women are described as organized and compassionate (Smith 2018). This study utilizes term frequency and inverse document frequency to examine the different ways that we describe success among different genders of cadets by conducting text analysis on ratings and comments from PDRs completed in the last year. The results from this study aims to help USMA further understand if any unintentional bias exist towards any gender or group of cadets through the language used in PDRs. This analysis also sets an additional benchmark for the continued development of evaluation processes in other contexts.