I may have wasted a perfectly good hour engaging with an interactive study that, by its author’s own admission, has no place on his CV. And perhaps my cynical enjoyment of the results I produced has to do with confirmation bias; for all I know the basic design of the study was similarly affected. Still, sometimes it’s fun to play around with statistical results, and who knows? What you discover may have some validity.
I’m referring to Ben Schmidt’s interactive study of gender markers in reviews on RateMyProfessors.com, that notorious site for disgruntled and (very occasionally) rhapsodic students who take the trouble to do more than fill out their class evaluations at the end of the term. Schmidt’s website allows you to type in a word or expression and learn whether it applies more to male or female teachers, including whether the usage is positive or negative. The assistant professor of history at Northeastern created the interactive a few years ago, and he points out that a crucial element in a study like this is surely the gender of the reviewer, which is missing. I also don’t know whether the site itself is frequented more by male or female students. Various other caveats apply, like Rate My Professors’ censorship of words like sexist.
But a study’s having limited value doesn’t make it uninteresting. Thinking of the words I’ve heard students use, I typed in hot; mean; tough; strict; easy; fair; unfair; funny; smart; stupid; ugly; old; exciting; interesting; boring; best; worst; sweet; sarcastic; great; terrible; idiot; and genius. I paid some attention to field of study; as Schmidt observes, the largest percentage of reviews go to female English and male math professors, and certain classes (gender studies; military history) tend to fill largely with students of one gender or the other. But mostly, I looked for trends.
If I came from another planet and had only this study and its attendant raw data to depend on, I would conclude that female professors are hotter, meaner, tougher, stricter, sweeter, less fair, less funny, stupider, uglier, and more idiotic than their male counterparts. Male professors, I would figure, are more likely to be exciting, sarcastic geniuses who teach great classes and give easy grades.
More interesting are the negative and positive connotations of words like tough, strict, or funny. Male professors are supposedly funnier than female ones, but when funniness is a downer, more female professors fit the bill than otherwise. Toughness seems to be a trait fairly equally shared among members, unlike strictness, which is largely female. But toughness is a good thing for a male teacher to possess, whereas for a female teacher it can often be a negative.
The good news is that men and women are neck and neck in the runnings for best teacher. Change that to best professor, though, and the men pull ahead. Worst teacher and worst professor tend to align with female professors. (One really wants, at this point, to know the gender of the reviewers.)
All of these conclusions confirm, sadly, my own expectations. They do not match my own experience in the classroom or on student evaluations. In more than 30 years of teaching, I’ve seen genuine shifts in attitudes toward female professors. The gender balance of the cadre of students who have requested me as an adviser has shifted from largely female to almost 50/50. There are, of course, proportionally fewer male professors for male students to choose, particularly in my field; from 1988 to 2004, the percentage of male professors in the humanities fell from 63 percent to just over 50 percent, and has surely continued to fall. Still, my sense is that the young men I teach and advise not only have an expectation of studying with female professors but also have parents who studied with both male and female professors back in, say, the 1980s, when I entered the profession.
The gender-cliché labels that attach to descriptions in Rate My Professors probably don’t align with widespread student experience of and response to the gender of their college instructors. Rather, they may reflect the extreme interest that the site manifests on the part of a relatively small subset of students. What marks a professor to such an extent that someone finds it worth going online to announce his or her opinion to the world, as if the semester-long course had been an evening in a special restaurant or a nightmare Caribbean cruise? For male professors, that stand-out attribute seems to be genius; for women, it seems to be hotness.
No honest accounting of a teacher’s gifts and shortcomings is to be found on a site like RateMyProfessors.com. And no reliable, peer-reviewed statistical analysis is to be found in Schmidt’s interactive study. But one of these admits its shortcomings. The other suggests that easy grading may be a sign of (male) genius, whereas a female professor’s strict grading policy proves her idiocy. That most of us experience our students’ responses quite differently is a positive sign of the times. That certain students go out of their way to provide fodder for the conclusions I reached after my hour with Schmidt’s study means stereotyping persists.
To my own delight, my name seems to have disappeared from the ratings website. I’ll have to make do with my favorite student evaluation, turned in on a handwritten form when there remained space for such comments:
Hip hip hooray!
Hoist the petard (whatever that means)!
Petard doesn’t turn up in Schmidt’s study. I suspect it would prove a gender-neutral term.
