Professor Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University created an interactive chart that enables you to explore the words used to describe professors in about 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessor.com.
You can enter any word and see how often it is used to describe teachers and professors of different subjects and genders — and the results are disappointingly predictable.
For example, here are the results when you search for "funny":
It seems that students generally consider male professors and teachers of the humanities to be the greatest comedians, while female professors, especially of mathematical and scientific diciplines, were not the laughing kind.
When searching for "genius" the gender breakdown looks very similar, with men described as genius far overtaking women:
Interestingly, the professors most labeled as genius teach music, math, science, and philosophy.
But when we searched for "bossy," the results were overwhelmingly biased toward women:
It seems the women considered the most bossy teach Fine Arts and Computer Science, while bossy men teach Science and Education, though significantly fewer are labeled as such.
What would Bey say?
