Benjamin Schmidt

Benjamin Schmidt in the Press

What Happens to News When Journalists and Historians Join Forces

A 2018 report by Northeastern University history professor Benjamin M. Schmidt confirmed a worrying trend: since the 2008 economic crisis, history has seen the steepest decline in majors, despite increased college enrollment overall.

Quartz

The 2008 financial crisis completely changed what majors students choose

The humanities were humming along prior to 2008, according to an analysis by the Northeastern University historian Benjamin Schmidt.

Quartz

If women want workplace equality, we’ve also got to stop sabotaging each other

That aggression, when referred to in women, is frequently described with words like “bossy” and “bitchy.” The terms have become so engendered that Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University who teaches a class on reading digital history, data-mapped the words used to describe professors at the top of their fields, based […]

Born to lead: Memoir of a bossy girl

Time and again they have shown that women leaders are more likely to receive critical feedback than men in leadership roles, and the women who lead are more often described as being abrasive and aggressive vs. the men who are referred to as brilliant and knowledgeable. One such study utilized an interactive chart developed by […]

Heartlessness as an intellectual style

A 1999 study of women’s emotional labor in academe found that “students expect female professors to be nicer than male professors and judge them more harshly when they are not.” More recently, the history professor Benjamin M. Schmidt, at Northeastern University, found that male professors were more likely to be called “geniuses,” while female professors […]

Donald Trump and the disturbing history of calling women ‘nasty’

Evidence emerges in how students nationwide describe their male and female professors. Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, crunched data from Rate My Professors to create a data visualization of popular terms used for men and women in academia. Teachers of both genders often come off as “assertive,” data from February 2015 show:

Mic

Student course evaluations are biased against female professors, study says

In March, Pacific Standard wrote a story about an interactive chart, titled Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews, that measures bias in words. Northeastern University assistant professor Benjamin Schmidt developed the program, using approximately 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. Given a word, the chart will show how frequently it appears in reviews for men and women […]

Ratings agency

Teachers could also benefit from a bit more of the scrupulous attention paid on modern campuses to sexual equality. Earlier analysis by Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University showed that the language used to describe professors was heavily gender-dependent. Men were more likely than women to be described as “intelligent” or “funny”, but less likely to […]

Gender bias exists in professor evaluations

Just like internal teaching evaluations, Viacom’s Rate My Professors gives students a platform to say whatever is on their minds, with anonymity and without fear of retribution. Many professors have wondered (based on some damningevidence) how strong a role gender bias plays in evaluations. Since Rate My Professors is the only place that puts large […]

Plight of the funny female

A few years ago, Laura Mickes was teaching her regular undergraduate class on childhood psychological disorders at the University of California, San Diego. It was a weighty subject, so occasionally she would inject a sarcastic comment about her own upbringing to lighten the mood. When she collected her professor evaluations at the end of the […]