Gendered Language and Professor Reviews

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!

Perhaps that is why sociology is so relevant!

Click here to return to the original post, Gender Lesson 2.