Website Documents Gender Differences in Professor Evaluations

Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston, has established a website where users can search for keywords in more than 14 million evaluations made by students at the popular RateMyProfessors website during 2014. Using this tool, visitors to the site can explore how often different words are used to describe professors broken down by gender.

For example, male professors are more likely than women professors to be referred to as “funny.” Women are more likely than men to be rated as “boring” and men are more likely than women to be evaluated as “interesting.” Men are 40 percent more likely than women to be referred to as  “smart,” 70 percent more likely to be “brilliant,” and 130 percent more like to be a “genius.” Women professors are more likely than male professors be referred to as “friendly,” “helpful,” or “organized.”

Often times, one gender is more likely than the other to be referred to on both ends of the spectrum on a particular attribute. For instance while men are more to be referred to as “smart,” they are also more likely to be cited as an “idiot.”

The data is broken down by academic discipline. Here is just one example. Women are more likely than men to be rated as “terrible” in 23 of 25 disciplines. But in mathematics and science, men are more likely than women to be evaluated as “terrible.”

Men and women professors were about equal in their being rated as “hot” or “sexy.”