Don’t forget, girls and boys, we achieved gender equality in 1972, so ever since then feminism has been nothing but an extremist attempt to monopolize all the good things for women only.
But then how do you explain a discouraging pattern in how women and men are seen and evaluated?
Students tend to think their male professors are “geniuses,” while their female professors are “bossy,” a new interactive chart reveals. Using data from RateMyProfessors.com, a popular forum for griping or raving about classes, Benjamin Schmidt, a Northeastern University professor, was able to clearly map out students’ biases.
The chart breaks down reviews to sort which words are affiliated with each gender and discipline. According to The Upshot, “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.”
You know…that could be another reason all the putative Stars of the atheoskepto movement are men. It could be partly because men like Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are seen as geniuses while a woman with the same qualities would be seen as a bossy pain in the ass. It’s not as if women aren’t aware of the general pattern, so it’s pretty likely that women try to adjust their presentation of self accordingly, and it’s also pretty likely that the resulting presentation of self isn’t the kind that makes you a star among atheoskeptics. It’s a double bind, in short. Women are under massive pressure not to come across as geniusbossy, and people who come across as Nicer don’t rise to the top in this particular niche.
Gendered language is one way those biases manifest themselves, and can do significant damage to women’s professional and personal lives. A recent analysis of performance reviews in the tech industry found that women were far more likely to receive criticism from their supervisors. The word “abrasive” was used many times to describe female employees, but never appeared in a review for any of the men.
“Abrasive” is also more likely to be used to describe a female professor on RateMyProfessor…
See? That which is considered “abrasive” and bad in a woman is considered merit in a man, so men get to use those qualities where they’re useful, and women either avoid them or are penalized for using them.
Discouraging, isn’t it.
Discouraging, yep.
Even more discouraging, to me, is the widespread ignorance or denial of biases like these, biases that have been pointed out and documented for forty years now.
Absolutely. That’s what I was hinting at (oh so subtly, so as not to be abrasive) in the first sentence. Shut up, Christina Hoff Sommers – you’re wrong.
… huh. Now I’m trying to parse my own high school experience to see if this bias affected my view of my teachers at the time. I was a bit more aware of this general bias in college and my favorite professors are fairly diverse, gender wise, but not my high school teachers…
I did that years & years ago, with all schooling. The results were not at all pleasing to me. I tried to console myself with “well it was just heterosexual blahblah” – but really I never convinced myself it was that simple.
Now that reminds me of the one female professor we had at our faculty. I and some of my friends were convinced she was the only one of our lecturers who could actually teach, while quite a few students were really hostile while talking about her.
I never understood why, only now I begin to suspect it might simply have been because she was a woman. Speaking of not recognizing bias…
Students tend to think their male professors are “geniuses,”
Really!? Students must be much more gullible than we were in the 70s.
I almost died laughing this past Fall when the press was describing Karen Lewis as unyielding and abrasive. This was the woman running against Rahm Emmanuel. That she was asshole-ish in their debates. Rahm Fucking Emmanuel, rather infamous as one of the single most abrasive and unyielding assholes the Democratic Party has ever produced. I mean honestly, how pervasive must the bias be in order to publicly pity Rahm Emmanuel for facing a woman who’ll talk back to him.
I saw that article on performance reviews a while back and it was a revelation–I have been working in a ‘male-dominated’ field for nearly 30 years and have NEVER had a performance review that wasn’t a personality critique…and having never seen a performance review for a man I had nothing to compare that experience to. I forwarded the article to my current boss; we’ll see what happens next time review season rolls around.
FFS Ophelia, will you stop being so shrill and abrasive! You will hurt the brave warriors’ fee-fees.
Recently, there was a reshuffle of the deck-chairs of the seemingly moribund federal government in Ozlandia. I read the comments about a newly installed minister who happened to be female. Without fail, she was shrill and Abbott’s bitch. I asked the commenter, would he call Toned Abbs shrill, and the reply was yes, sure. Bullshit.
I don’t like the conservative government, and like the majority of commentators at that site, I’d be classified as progressivy. It annoyed me that other progressives would have a go at someone of the other tribe as shrill, because she spoke up for her cause and was female, not comment on her actual failings, which she may or may not have, as I’d never heard of her, and I dare say nor had anybody else. /end rant!
I hate to be the one that asks, but…
how did they control for the possibility that the male lecturers were simply on average smarter, or less bossy, than the female lecturers? I’m not saying that’s the case, but it seems like an equally valid interpretation of the data.
The article does link this study https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/12/macnell-gender-2014/ which controls for that possibility, so I’m not pretending that the bias isn’t there, I just don’t see a way to control for it here. I guess most people are comfortable dismissing that possibility, which is good and progressive and everything, but doesn’t seem very scientific.
So universities choose female lecturers who are less intelligent and more abrasive than male lecturers because reasons?
In society, women have to be better (read smarter and more amiable) than men to get the same gig. Yet, not in this case….
Huh. Somehow I associate “abrasive” with men …
Thinking back … I can’t remember ever thinking this way. No idea about others, though, as I generally have trouble making out what “the others in general” think unless it’s fairly obvious.
In any case, I remember, starting shortly after school, when I noticed a distinct lack of m/f ratio balance, often wishing for more women in whatever group that was; I don’t recall ever wishing for more men, funnily enough, even in the face of obvious imbalance. Which in itself shows a differing look at these two groups, of course, just not – or so it seems to me – the usual one.
Of course, this might be related to having been pretty persistently bullied in school, and, as far as I recall, over 90% of that was by my own gender.
It seems plausible that the male lecturers would on average have seniority on their female colleagues, and thus both have and display more experience/confidence/knowledge – Brian E @ # 10 may have a point.
Any realistic analysis of students’ impressions needs to measure for multiple characteristics covering looks, demeanor, reputation, topic and you-name-it. Ben Schmidt’s chart sorts only by survey words chosen, “gender and discipline” – it reveals an interesting pattern but doesn’t bring much more actual understanding than factoids from Harper’s Index.
Well, yes, but that’s changing the subject. Showing knowledge as a senior staff member isn’t the same as selecting new people based on their intelligence and personality (however you measure these things) and then saying we’ll select women who show less intelligence and are more abrasive then men.
Perhaps I’m confused. It happens regularly, so apologies if I’m on the wrong subject.
Well it’s no surprise – plenty of people find the very idea of women talking out about how society treats them as “abrasive”, while these same people claim harassment of feminists is “just criticism”.
PRB @ 13 In my experience, the senior faculty tend to be the least impressive at most colleges and universities, because competition for academic jobs has become so much more intense over the past twenty-thirty years.
Moreover, there is a whole collection of negative adjectives which are frequently used to describe women and rarely (if ever) used to describe men (eg. the term “abrasive” was NEVER used for men). So, if the problem is not sexism, how can we explain this? Are men just objectively that much better than women? Are female professors really just stupid bitches who get hired because of affirmative action? Can anyone come up with a third, overarching explanation that would account for this imbalance that does not amount to women just aren’t as good as men?
Katherine Eaton, I know this will seem pedantic (and it probably is) but:
Seldom, perhaps.
Never, no.
(https://www.google.com/search?q=%22abrasive+man%22+-made)
In one of the studies cited above, abrasive was never used of men. That is what I was referring to. The imbalances in these studies, overall, are not subtle. They indicate either that there is substantial sexism, or that women often have serious intellectual and interpersonal problems which men rarely display (or maybe some combination of the two). I’m on team sexism is a major issue. YMMV.
Thanks for the clarification, Katherine.
Brian E @ # 14: Showing knowledge as a senior staff member isn’t the same as selecting new people based on their intelligence and personality …
Maybe I missed a beat, but I thought this study concerned students’ perceptions, not hiring committees’.
Katherine Eaton @ # 16: In my experience, the senior faculty tend to be the least impressive …, because competition for academic jobs has become so much more intense …
A factor I had probably under-rated, though I had mostly been thinking of medicine, engineering, etc, where real-world experience in verifiable problem-solving might count for more than in, e.g., literature or philosophy. Certainly I had no intention of dismissing sexism as a major factor in students’ evaluations, but I still agree with Brian E that other aspects of personal presentation may count for much of such. Also, ageism and sexism interact: gray hair may give some men an air of “authority” more than it would to many women.
It would be interesting to compare students’ impressions with those of faculty peers, and whatever “objective” measures might come to hand…
SIGH. I’m always asking my husband if I come across as a “know it all” because I am engaged and like learning about the latest politics, science, etc. (To his credit, my husband always says no and that I shouldn’t worry about it.) And I understand how to parse science beyond popular news items. So when people bring up these things, I have readily available knowledge and like to share it. I feel like people would prefer if I talked about the weather or clothes or something else that I can’t even identify. It’s really hard. I even feel isolated in my local humanist etc. group even though I’m the ‘VP’. People often go out after the meetup but I never seem to be invited. And yet, another member, who is a strongly opinionated and vocal man, is considered one of the gang.
I went to a very small college and took a technology degree. I had almost exclusively male professors, so I can’t really evaluate my own impressions of gender. But I do distinctly remember the class that all students coming into the program had to take. The professor running it was a real jerk – hypercritical, abrasive, and just plain mean at times. After I passed that class I had several others with the same guy, and he was just as sweet as can be. I realized that he had acted that way to weed out the “weaklings” including the only woman in the class. THEN I realized he really was a jerk.
…men like Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are seen as geniuses while a woman with the same qualities would be seen as a bossy pain in the ass.
I tend to be more egalitarian: I see men like Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens as a bossy pain in the ass. and factually challenged to boot.