Williams and Ceci (2015)sought to Determine If Gender Biases Exist

Williams and Ceci (2015) sought to determine if gender biases exist in academic hiring practices.They studied almost 1,000 professors in a mock hiring situation in which each professor read the files of several job applicants and then rank-ordered the applicants in terms of most-to-least qualified.What the professors did not know was that the gender of the job applicants was randomly assigned to the professors.That is,if one professor read that job applicant A was a woman,another professor read that the same job applicant A was a man.As a result,an average rating of each applicant could be compared when that applicant was presented as a male and as a female.In this study,what is the independent variable?

A) the number of professors
B) the rank-order
C) the gender of the applicants
D) the number of applicants