Female academics face huge sexist bias [View all]

Female academics face huge sexist bias – no wonder there are so few of them

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/feb/13/female-academics-huge-sexist-bias-students

Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor at Northeastern University, has created an online tool that allows users to compare the frequency of particular words in evaluations of male and female professors. Schmidt created the interactive chart using data from 14 million student reviews on the website RateMyProfessors.com. The results are striking.

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Reviews of male professors are more likely to include the words “brilliant”, “intelligent” or “smart”, and far more likely to contain the word “genius”. Meanwhile, women are more likely to be described as “mean”, “harsh”, “unfair” or “strict”, and a lot more likely to be called “annoying”.

Immediately recognisable societal stereotypes emerge – the words “disorganized” or “unorganized” [sic] come up much more frequently in women’s evaluations, while men are far more likely to be described as “cool” or “funny”, with one of the widest gender splits of all on the word “hilarious”. Women are more commonly called “nice” or “helpful”, but men are more often described as “good”.

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The implications are serious. In the competitive world of academia, student evaluations are often used as a tool in the process of hiring and promotion. That the evaluations may be biased against female professors is particularly problematic in light of existing gender imbalance, particularly at the highest echelons of academia. According to the American Association of University Professors, in 2012, 62% of men in academia in the US were tenured compared to only 44% of women, while women were far more likely to be in non-tenure track positions than men (32% of women in academia compared to just 19% of men).