Chart of the Day: Male profs are “geniuses,” female ones are “bossy”

A Northeastern University professor has created an interactive chart that reveals the gendered biases in students’ evaluations of their profs on RateMyProfessors.com. You can input any word — like, say, “genius” or “bossy” — and see how often it’s used by gender and academic department. 

To continue with those examples, take a wild guess about how those two words broke down. Here are the results for “genius”:

And for “bossy”:

As the The Upshot sums up: “Men are more likely to be described as a star, knowledgeable, awesome or the best professor. Women are more likely to be described as bossy, disorganized, helpful, annoying or as playing favorites. Nice or rude are also more often used to describe women than men.” I’m sure if you spend a little time playing around with it, you’ll find even more depressing results.

These biases appear in job performances evaluations too. Meanwhile, a recent study of online course evaluations showed that students who thought they were being taught by women gave them worse marks than students who thought they were being taught by men, regardless of the actual gender of the instructor.