25 September, 2013

Pure Silliness

The Hotties and the Notties — The Monkey Cage:
Continuing our series of serious inquiries into whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession, we actually have Real Social Scientific Data that we can bring to bear on this topic.[1] In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson have conducted research that sought to establish, inter alia how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague Professor Sides has prepared a nice graph of the data (see below).