  Institutions widely use student evaluations to assess the faculty's teaching
performance, but underlying trends and biases can influence their
interpretation. Using data from Rate My Professors, we conduct the largest and
most recent quantitative data analysis to study questions related to the
evaluation criteria that students have when they review the performance of
their male and female professors. Our analysis spans data from two decades
(1999-2019), thus taking into account recent changes on the website and in the
perception of students, and demonstrates interesting insights related to how
students perceive the teaching style and personality traits of their male and
female professors. We also present the first analysis that investigates how
gender bias evolves over time and changes over space. We believe that our
results are interesting from a sociological viewpoint, as they investigate the
role of gender in higher education by disclosing how students perceive and
evaluate professors of different genders. In addition, we believe that our
findings can be useful to educational institutions when considering possible
biases that exist in the evaluations of their faculty.
