Sociology professor Ben Schmidt has gathered the metadata from ratemyprofessor.com at his site, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. He compiled the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com into an interactive chart that lets you explore. You can enter any word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here. Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do. Below are some results that I found interesting. I find it really remarkable that so many terms are completely genderized. I would love to study this further to find out if the genderization is because our society uses different words to describe males and females even if the words are describing a similar trait, or if the genderization is because our society thinks about men and women differently. The truth is probably a combination of both. Here are the words nice and friendly. Are female professors really nicer and friendlier than males? That seems unlikely since mean and annoying shows up as female as well!
And these are college professors, right? They all have more education than 93% of the United States. But male professors are cited as smart much more often in every single subject area!
However, we will also see in our lessons to come later that education is not masculine, so males are also cited consistently as geeky, nerdy and dorky.
Is there a difference between condescending and sarcastic? At least one difference is that males are sarcastic, but females are condescending.
Women are always labelled as nuts or crazy more than men.
A special shout-out to all those female sociology professors doing life changing work!
And sociology shows up as the most eye-opening subject too! Thanks to those fearless female professors!
Although income is usually what people think of first when they think of social class, there are many other elements that are a part of social class. All of these components both exemplify social class inequality and they exacerbate it. Please read about each element below. As you go through, think about what an average American looks like and how your family compares. I want you to have a better understanding of where your family fits compared to the average American when the lesson is finished.
Wealth
Wealth is tricky to understand. It is everything that a household owns, such as the home, vacation home, cars, 401K, savings, stocks, jewelry, etc...But, you must subtract what the household owes. So, if my house is $200,000 but I owe $160,000 then my wealth is only $40,000 on the house.
One way to examine wealth is through quintiles (20% increments). if you lined all the households up in the U.S. by wealth, what percentage would the top 20% own? And then the next 20% and so on...Another way to think about this is if you have 5 people who are sharing a pie, what percent of the pie does the first person get, and the second person and third, etc...
Try the following exercise on your own:
First, hypothesize, how much of the wealth (the pie) in the U.S. do you think each quintile (person) has: Bottom 20%:______ 2nd 20%_______ 3rd 20%________ 4th 20%_______ 5th 20%_______Top (least) (most)
Second, write how much you think each quintile should have? Bottom 20%:______ 2nd 20%________ 3rd 20%________ 4th 20%_______ 5th 20%_______Top
After you have finished answering the questions above, watch this video:
What is the reality? How is the wealth actually divided?
1. How does your guess about wealth compare to how it is actually distributed? (Here is the Google form for this lesson - I recommend opening this in a new window and then answer each question after you read the info.)
The overall conclusion about wealth is that the disparity of wealth is greater than that of income (see the pie graph below). The top 1% of America owns 34% of everything. The top 10% owns 70%. And half of America owns 96% of everything. In other words the bottom half, 50% of America, owns almost nothing. They have no money saved - for retirement or otherwise. Once you deduct their debts, they have almost no equity - from their homes, or possessions or bank accounts.
The average wealth of Americans DQYDJ (Don't Quit Your Day Job)
The median is up from this 2010 Huffington Post report which analyzed a Congressional Research Bulletin about wealth, "The median household net worth -- the level at which half the households have more and half have less -- was $77,300" For a much more detailed analysis of wealth, see this post from business insider.
How does your family or community compare to the average American?
Average American:50% own 2 cars,50% have a 401K, 66% own 1 home, (only 6% own a second home like a condo or lake house).
2. How does your family's wealth compare to the average American? Feel free to comment on any of the above stats, or a combination of them:
how much the total household net worth is
cars
401K
owning a house or second home
Education
In the US, here are the percentages of adults over the age of 23 who have attained each degree in 2012:
High school graduate
87.65%
Some college
57.28%
Associate's and/or Bachelor's degree
40.58%
Bachelor's degree
30.94%
Master's degree
8.05%
Doctorate or professional degree
3.07%
3. Did you realize that so few people have a bachelor's degree or higher? Where does your family fall in terms of educational level? The median American educational level is some college, but no degree. Is the educational level in your family higher or lower and by how much?
Not only is education level stratified, but the family's educational level determines, on average what the family's income will be (on average). In other words, the higher your education is, the more money one is likely to earn. Link to College Board research report here. The graph below shows how median income goes up for each level of education, even if you factor in income taxes (which also go up):
Another way that data shows education impacting social class is that parents' educational level correlates with children's educational attainment. The graph below shows that the less education that parents have, the less education their children obtain. In other words, if parents don't have a college degree, the child is not likely to attain a college degree and visa-versa; parents with an advanced degree are more likely to have children who attain an advanced degree themselves.
Not only is educational level shaped by parents' social class, but also the major that a student chooses is too. This research from Natasha Quadlin shows that the major a student chooses at college is influenced by social class.
Lastly, people from different social classes are more likely to interact together at college. From The Upshot of NY Times, this interactive site allows you to see what percent of students from the top 1% and bottom 60% attend each school of higher education. The graph below shows where students from different social classes end up after high school:
Location
The price of a home depends on a lot more than the physical structure of the home. From FRED, the average home price in the United States in 2019 was about $380K. But the average home price varies considerably from state to state. For example, West VA was the lowest with an average home price of $108K and California was one of the highest at $554K. The average for Illinois was $202K.
4. How do you think your home's value compares to the average home price? (Remember from the wealth section above, the average American owns a home.)
Opportunity Insights provides data about how neighborhoods shape residents' life chances.
Here is a map from Time showing the most economically segregated cities in America. Can you find your town? How does this segregation affect the residents?
This research from Harvard shows that zipcode is a better predictor for health than genetic code.
WSJ data shows where college grads are likely to move after they graduate. Recall that only about 30% of Americans get a college degree, and out of that small group, notice where most of them move to after college.
Here is Indiana U and U of I:
Try Accessing the data through this link (sometimes you have to be on campus to get it to work):
If the link above does not work, these might: OFF CAMPUS ACCESS DURING PANDEMIC:
You will use the same link to access, then click the "sign in" link in the corner and use the username and password below:http://www.wsj.com/highschoolUsername:schoolaccess@wsj.comPassword: wsj123
For full access to the WSJ when you're on campus, you need to use the following special link: www.wsj.com/highschool
Once there, the fastest way for you (and your students) to find the article you're looking for is to click the search icon and enter the words "grads database"
What does this data say about your life after college?
On a less personal level, what does this data say about the U.S. in general?
5. How do you think where college grads move affect social class in the U.S.?
Prestige and power
People view different occupations with different levels of prestige. This prestige can translate to real power such as being appointed to boards or committees. It can also simply give you credibility or respect in social situations. Here is a chart of prestige ratings.
6. What is the median prestige job in this data? Where does your family's prestige rating fall compared to this?
Power, according to Max Weber, is the ability to impose one's will on others. One example is how the world's most powerful leaders gather in secret meetings annually to discuss how they can shape policy, economics and laws among other things. One such meeting is the American Enterprise Institute held every year on an island off the coast of Georgia where attendees can fly their jets on and off the island in private. Another meeting is the Bilderberg meeting.
Some examples of power are the abilities to keep yourself out of jail, influence politicians and enact laws that are you favor. Here is one example from The Daily Show comparing teachers and Wall Street Investors. Can you guess who has the power?
And this article from the NY Times shows that an executive at United Airlines accused of corruption charges was forced to resign. Imagine if a teacher was accused of corruption and was forced to resign. That would be it - out of a job and no compensation. But,