  Students are increasingly using online materials to learn new subjects or to
supplement their learning process in educational institutions. Issues regarding
gender bias have been raised in the context of formal education and some
measures have been proposed to mitigate them. However, online educational
materials in terms of possible gender bias and stereotypes which may appear in
different forms are yet to be investigated in the context of search bias in a
widely-used search platform. As a first step towards measuring possible gender
bias in online platforms, we have investigated YouTube educational videos in
terms of the perceived gender of their narrators. We adopted bias measures for
ranked search results to evaluate educational videos returned by YouTube in
response to queries related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics) and NON-STEM fields of education. Gender is a research area by
itself in social sciences which is beyond the scope of this work. In this
respect, for annotating the perceived gender of the narrator of an
instructional video we used only a crude classification of gender into Male,
and Female. Then, for analysing perceived gender bias we utilised bias measures
that have been inspired by search platforms and further incorporated rank
information into our analysis. Our preliminary results demonstrate that there
is a significant bias towards the male gender on the returned YouTube
educational videos, and the degree of bias varies when we compare STEM and
NON-STEM queries. Finally, there is a strong evidence that rank information
might affect the results.
