#ILookLikeAPlanningProfessor update

Well, that was short-lived. The image of planning professors is now nearly all male. This may reveal that Google's image search takes recent hits/clicks/activity into account, but if that activity is not sustained, those images drop down. 

Maybe I do #LookLikeAPlanningProfessor

After I tweeted the photo of the Google image search results for planning professor (an all male result), it also got shared and discussed on an email list of planning faculty. That must have prompted several people to do the search themselves and, I assume, click on the women they found in the results. Today, two days later, the results are very different.

#DoILookLikeAPlanningProfessor?

Earlier today I read about the #ILookLikeAProfessor activity on Twitter and elsewhere bringing light to diversity in my profession. When I looked at the tweets with the hashtag, there were a couple that included Google image searches of English Professor and History Professor. The results were all white men. That prompted me to do a Google image search on Planning Professor. I didn't think my field would be as bad as those, but it wasn't much better. The screen was filled with men, though not all white.



I realize that my Google search will get different images than yours. And, in full disclosure I will note that when I scrolled down to row 5 (below my screen shot), two women appeared. But as I kept scrolling, the gender balance didn't improve very much. I don't believe that it reflects the make-up of planning faculty in the U.S. I even noted that about six of my Portland State colleagues showed up, all men. That's despite the fact that we have 9 women and 13 men listed on our website, all with the same profile pages from where those images came.

Obviously underlying this is Google's search engine that produces these results. I don't know enough about how that works to hypothesize why the results are turning out this way. But, I may try to explore it more. In particular, I want to make sure that there is not something PSU is doing with their website that skews the results in a unintentional, but problematic way.

Seven quick things I learned about bicycling nationally

I recently completed a national poll of people living in urban areas in conjunction with the National Association of Realtors® on Community and Transportation Preferences. The overall results are posted here. The survey included 3,000 adults living in the 50 largest urban areas in the U.S. (That includes suburban areas, as well as denser urban cores.) 

The full blog post is on the TREC Blog: http://trec.pdx.edu/blog/seven-quick-things-i-learned-about-bicycling-nationally