Gendered Language in College Teacher Reviews

I taught at the University of Minnesota for a few years while I was a graduate student. I mostly taught one particular class, which had a limit of 16 students. I got pretty good evaluations, but of course I tend to remember the not-as-great ones, which can be summed up as, "She knows her stuff, but she talks really fast." (This will not surprise people who know me.)

Anyway, I thought of this when checking out Ben Schmidt's interactive tool, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. You can plug in a word or phrase and the site graphs how often the word(s) are used per million words of text on RateMyProfesseor.com, organized by gender and academic field.

Big shock... men are much more brilliant and funny and just everything else good than women. (I did find one where some of the fields had women rated higher: angry.)

Here are two of my favorites, first, Charismatic:


Gee, who knew political science, psychology, business, sociology, and history are such cults of personality? Well, I guess I had some idea... there was a poli sci prof at my college who had a following, and all of those fields are ones known for pop culture authors and pundits.

Then there's Genius:


The Music gap is especially startling (and notice the change in scale on the x-axis between this and the Charismatic graph, too!). This result makes me extra-glad that orchestras have long been holding blinded auditions.

Have fun playing around with it, and don't get too depressed.