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What can the past challenges of female professors teach us today?
Female professors are still given unequal treatment to their male colleagues, through tenure and even student reviews. Boston is renowned as a city of academia, and there is still a lot of improvement that needs to be made locally, and throughout the United States.
By understanding the backgrounds and challenges female professors faced long ago, we can better understand the challenges that still exist today and work to overcome them.
What words do you think are used most often, even today, to describe male vs. female professors in student reviews? How do these words reveal and impact our perception?
What words do you think are used most often, even today, to describe male vs. female professors in student reviews? How do these words reveal and impact our perception?
In course evaluations and student reviews, many male professors are described in terms of their professionalism and knowledge of the topic, while female professors are described more based on their appearances and stereotypically-maternal qualities. These descriptions reveal an internal and subconscious double standard that female professors are held to.
Above are two examples that show the discrepancy between descriptions of male vs. female professors, based on data from current RateMyProfessor reviews. Click here to discover more differences by plugging in words of your choice.
Schmidt, Ben, "Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews", https://benschmidt.org/profGender.
Next Steps
There is still plenty of research to be done to recognize the stories and impact of female professors in Boston and throughout the United States. We acknowledge that there is especially still a lot of work to do regarding the stories of female professors that belong to other minority groups, and that their unique stories deserve to be uncovered as well.
For further information on some of their stories, see our page on Further Research below.
What You Can Do
The next time you are with older family members, or have some time to talk with your professor or teacher, ask if they feel comfortable sharing their story with you. Maybe they remember living through the 1970s, or another time period that experienced lots of change.
What we think of as "history" comes from the individual histories within all of us, and there are still so many stories that have yet to be uncovered. Find out how people in your life played a role in history, and someday, you will also have a history to share.
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