3 thoughts on “Explore the gendered language of Rate My Professor”

  1. When I presented male I was a TA for 7 years. After I transitioned I noticed an adjective on my course evaluation that had never been their before “sassy.” (that’s not the only change, but it was pretty striking)

  2. This tool is great! Try putting in “bossy”, and “annoying” – the results are eye-opening

  3. We have to be a bit careful with the data, since many of the words had low use rates. ‘Genius’ does skew towards men, but for some disciplines it was used less than 50 times.

    More interesting for me was ‘funny’, which appears to skew male more strongly even than ‘genius’, and had a response in the several hundreds. This could be tied to overall student feedback scores (more entertaining = better professor?). So, why is there such a disparity? Because people have lower expectations of women being funny? Because being funny in front of students requires some risk taking, and women feel less able to take that risk? Because women already face not being taken as serious academics by their students and don’t want to exacerbate that?

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