Not an April Fools' joke - there really is such a professor at Yale (!):
"Marianne LaFrance, Professor of Psychology and Women's and Gender Studies
Marianne LaFrance joined the Yale faculty in 1998. Her research focuses on how gender and power are reflected in and maintained by subtle communication processes. Nonverbal behaviors are of particular interest because they lie out-of-awareness and typically operate off-the-record. Also, nonverbal cues can simultaneously reveal information about an individual's identity and attitudes as well as shape and sustain social relationships. LaFrance's goal is to determine why facial expressions like smiling, or linguistic strategies like apologizing, reveal clear gender differences. Her conceptual model, called Expressivity Demand Theory, aims at specifying when people display such behaviors and what functions they serve in social interaction."
"In related research, LaFrance is investigating how gender and power affect patterns of implicit causality resulting from verbal descriptions. Studies have shown that attributions for interpersonal events are substantially altered by the inclusion of gender or power information. Now, she is interested in determining why agents are seen as more causal when they are described as behaving toward women than when they behave towards men. The organizing theme of LaFrance's research is to understand how subtle and implicit messages reveal, justify, and preserve unequal social structures. La France completed her graduate work at Boston University."
professor + yale = dimwit