Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender – NYTimes.com

Frequency of word “genius” in RatemyProfessor

Interesting study on bias, this time in the university setting:

Studies have also shown that students can be biased against female professors. In one, teachers graded and returned papers to students at the exact same time, but when asked to rate their promptness, students gave female professors lower scores than men. Biases cut both ways — teachers have also been found to believe girls are not as good in math and science, even when they perform similarly to boys.

Mr. Schmidt, who made the chart as part of a project called Bookworm for searching and visualizing large texts, said he was struck by “this spectrum from smart to brilliant to genius, where each one of those is more strongly gendered male than the previous one was.” He was also surprised that relatively few people commented on female professors’ clothing or looks, which he had expected to be the case.

Another surprise, he said, was Shakespeare — apparently many more men than women teach it in English departments.

Men are more likely to be described as a star, knowledgeable, awesome or the best professor. Women are more likely to be described as bossy, disorganized, helpful, annoying or as playing favorites. Nice or rude are also more often used to describe women than men.

Men and women seemed equally likely to be thought of as tough or easy, lazy, distracted or inspiring.

Interestingly, women were more likely to be described in reviews as role models. Mr. Schmidt notes that the reviews are anonymous, so he doesn’t know the gender of reviewers. It could be that more female students describe female professors as role models than men do when describing men or women.

Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender – NYTimes.com.