An awesome new interactive data set shows the different ways that students view their male and female professors across a range of subjects, based on reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.
The interactive chart was created by Ben Schmidt, a history professor at Northeastern University. According to his website, Schmidt pulled about 14 million reviews from the popular professor review website.
Using Schmidt's chart, you can search RateMyProfessor to see how often a word appears in student-written reviews, and whether that word is more common for male or female professors. Searches can go through all reviews, or can be broken down to just positive or negative reviews.
Perhaps the two most important words that most students are looking for on RateMyProfessor - "easy" and "hard" - didn't seem to a notable split based on gender:
Easy
Hard
Another word, perhaps more surprisingly, that didn't have much of a gendered difference was "hot":
Hot
One of the most telling examples of how students view their professors was highlighted by Inside Higher Ed, which noted the gendered divide in the use of the word "genius" on RateMyProfessor reviews:
