Editorial: More room for gender equality in college classrooms

You walk into a lecture on the first day of classes. Hopefully, the professor will be intelligent, knowledgable and fair — but how about attractive? 

Many students use ratemyprofessors.com to decide which classes to enroll in, or which to avoid. 

Today, these student reviews of professors are giving us insight into how gender roles play into professor reviews.

Benjamin Schmidt, a Northeastern University history professor, built a chart using 14 million student reviews from the popular college website, according to The New York Times article “The Upshot.” 

His findings? Male professors are brilliant, awesome and knowledgeable. Women are bossy, annoying, beautiful or ugly.

To be fair, these findings indicate a bias that is often unconscious, as physical attraction is — for many people — natural. There is problem, however, when physical attributes overshadow even more important qualities in professional and personal impressiveness, like intelligence, knowledge and character. 

College is supposed to be an environment in which progress thrives and free thinking flourishes. Schmidt’s findings do not reflect this ideal. We must consider the consequences of reviewing women primarily by their physical traits, rather than their intellectual and personality traits. If we do not, we will continue to belittle the wisdom, experience and work of accomplished female professors and academics. 

We can never make progress toward gender equality until more students and citizens are aware of and acknowledge disparities like those that Schmidt’s study illuminates. 

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, and Adam Grant, a business professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, highlighted this unconscious filter in judging the work performance of men and women that persists in our society. As they note, “A man who doesn’t help is ‘busy;’ a woman is ‘selfish.’” Hopefully, awareness campaigns such as Sandberg and Grant’s New York Times articles will help  deserving female professors and employees earn the same respect as their deserving male counterparts. 

So, the next time you review one of your professors, remember  there is more to a woman than physical appearance. Remember, as nice as it is when professors have a chili pepper next to their names, the University community will better value and benefit from acknowledgement of their academic achievements.