Female Academics Face Huge Sexist Bias – No Wonder There Are So Few of Them
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.
We already know that performance evaluations can reveal serious gender bias, whether deliberate or unconscious, and that women and men can be judged very differently for exhibiting similar behaviour. Where a man is seen as assertive, decisive or passionate, a woman risks accusations of being shrill, overbearing or hysterical; a phenomenon that can have a particularly negative impact for women in the workplace. But this new data seems to suggest that the problem starts earlier, and is already in full effect during higher education...