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{"id":38,"date":"2015-02-11T10:05:07","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T14:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/todojustice\/?p=38"},"modified":"2015-08-22T14:58:43","modified_gmt":"2015-08-22T18:58:43","slug":"bias-against-female-professors-is-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/todojustice\/2015\/02\/11\/bias-against-female-professors-is-real\/","title":{"rendered":"Bias against female professors is real"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"female-teacher-blackboard\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

A history professor at Northeastern University in Boston has just developed a tool<\/a> to search the ubiquitous student rankings found at \u201cRate My Professor.\u201d \u00a0For those of you who don\u2019t know ratemyprofessor, it is an online site where college students can go and \u201crate\u201d their professors on a range of factors, some related to their teaching (and to student learning) and others, not so much (students can assign a hot chili pepper to those professors that the students find, well, \u201chot\u201d). Because this rating system is voluntary, and not administered to all students in a given course, it tends to disproportionately draw students who either love or hate particular professors.<\/p>\n

As a female professor, I have had my share of caustic student comments (on university evaluations as well as ratemyprofessor) that have taken on a gendered tone. But as a tenured,\u00a0full professor, I have less concern for myself than for the deeply unsettling insight\u00a0that this data exposes about how sexism is working in the classroom (for an example of this put the terms \u201csmart\u201d and \u201cintelligent\u201d in the search engine and check out the results). My concern is both for the learning environment and how students\u2019\u00a0own sexism is negatively impacting the students in question as well as\u00a0for the junior female professors who struggle with questions of their classroom persona, their teaching authority, and how best to embody what it means to be a smart, intelligent, and respected teacher and scholar in a world where those categories are still, too often, defined by male norms. A good friend and colleague is currently writing a piece on how women professors decide how to dress in the classroom for a teaching website, a question that, I suspect, is far more challenging for women professors than our male colleagues.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And if the impact of gender bias is this pronounced in the classroom, we can also speculate about what\u2019s happening related to racial bias among student populations. Young, women of color professors often face a dizzying array of subconscious bias that makes\u00a0classroom teaching even more challenging. Having served as a department chair and as a mid-career professor, I have supported, counseled, and strategized with a number of my female colleagues about how to address these issues in the classroom and in tenure materials.<\/p>\n

To\u00a0any students reading this \u2013 I encourage you to think about the ways in which your own bias and prejudice may be impacting your capacity to learn from your instructors.<\/p>\n

To my teaching colleagues in the academy \u2013 this data set is a gold mine of information that can help us begin to examine and talk about the ways in which implicit bias functions in our classrooms and in your institutions.<\/p>\n

As a postscript, I just spent a hour searching for a graphic to accompany this post and nearly every image in\u00a0the public domain associated with the\u00a0search term \u201cprofessor\u201d was male, of those associated with \u201cteacher\u201d closer to half or more were female, though most were clearly elementary and secondary school teachers.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"