yayfeminism:Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on GenderMale professors are brilliant
yayfeminism:Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on GenderMale professors are brilliant, awesome and knowledgeable. Women are bossy and annoying, and beautiful or ugly.These are a few of the results from a new interactive chart that was gaining notice on social media Friday. Benjamin Schmidt, a Northeastern University history professor, says he built the chart using data from 14 million student reviews on the Rate My Professors site. It allows you to search for any word to see how often it appeared in reviews and how it broke down by gender and department.The chart makes vivid unconscious biases. The implications go well beyond professors and college students, to anyone who gives or receives feedback or performance reviews.It suggests that people tend to think more highly of men than women in professional settings, praise men for the same things they criticize women for, and are more likely to focus on a woman’s appearance or personality and on a man’s skills and intelligence.An even more depressing addendum: this data is compiled from Rate My Professors, which is always lolworthy and, while really not reliable for some things, presents in more obvious terms the only slightly more subtle gender biases that end up on our course evaluations: course evaluations that are most often used as the single most important factor in evaluating our teaching and determining whether or not we keep our jobs.On course evals, I’ve been called “scatter-brained” and “ditzy,” I’ve been criticized for not being “sympathetic” enough, and criticized when students say they can’t feel emotionally connected to me. Even positive comments (which I always love, btw) are heavily gendered: I’m “nice,” “caring,” etc. Male professors are not going to get this bullshit on their evals. You know what sucks even more? In general, faculty and admins at institutions give zero fucks about gender bias in teaching! Maybe they know that it exists, but they don’t do anything about it. I spent a year revamping assignments and the structures I put in place for discussion, and worked with a close faculty mentor (an older male prof) who did some of the same stuff in his classroom. It was an experiment, and it was a huge amount of work, and the goal behind it was to try to become a better teacher. And it completely bombed for me. I got the same “strict,” “bossy,” “bitchy, likes failing students,” comments and and similar crap. And, you know, that’s okay. Sometimes you try things and they don’t work.The student feedback in itself wasn’t too terrible, even though I still get indirectly criticized for that year still (“oh, how much you’ve improved!”). The worst part is having female colleagues tell me bullshit like this: that that huge overhaul of my teaching that year was primarily my attempt to bolster my authority in the classroom because I was insecure. Actual true story. But wait! Another depressing addendum! Take all of the above stuff and then add in race? And it gets even worse. So professors who are women of color (most especially younger ones) get pummeled the worst out of everyone. And we wonder why there aren’t many WOC in academia. -- source link
#academic rants