Ratemyprofessors.com is where I find myself every semester, reading the upcoming schedule while searching the site for clues on whose class would best suit me. I know I’m not alone, but the reviews we’re reading could be dependent on the teacher’s gender, and not their competency.

Recently, Benjamin M. Schmidt, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, created an interactive graph that word searches 14 million reviews from the site based on gender. While Skyline’s reviews weren’t accounted for in the graph, San Francisco State University was included, among many CSUs and UCs, as well as the nearby De Anza College.

The graph’s algorithm starts you off with “funny,” which shows a divide between male and female professors. For every million words, male psychology teachers are mentioned as “funny” a little over 1300 times while female counterparts only garner 600 instances. It’s not that psychology is a male dominated field, or even that women aren’t funny (because we are, trust me). Throughout every discipline on the list, women are outnumbered.

One interesting instance is the “nice” and “mean” overlap. Plug in the “nice” keyword and women are the leaders, but type in “mean” and women are also the leaders. There seems to be no winning this battle. Female professors who expect more from their students are seen as harsh and tyrannical while men who ask for the same are expected.

There’s no information about the gender of the reviewers available, but I don’t think that would change much. If you type in any attribute you would want a teacher to have, like “funny,” “smart,” or “cool” into the interactive graph and female teachers trail. Entering words like “strict” or “bossy” brings up more female professor reviews.

This is not a reflection of how funny smart or cool our female professors are, but rather how we perceive and talk about women in general.