I was going to put this article in the Montreal Gazette (via Beauty Tips for Ministers, which has some good commentary on it too) in the Thursday Links post, but I realized I have a lot to say about it. The article presents a study that says that attractive academics have a hard time being taken seriously as academics by their peers and their students. The group of academics that fares the worst? Female professors in male-dominated fields. Paging Captain Obvious!
“Men didn’t say it caused any trouble per se with their peers; they were just really embarrassed by it,” Wilson says. “But attractive women in science felt like their male colleagues took them less seriously because of (the chatter), and treated them like bimbos at conferences. They had to take extra measures to look serious.”
Well, yes, unfortunately. I’m not a prof, obviously, but I’ve seen lots of instances of commentary on appearance from students, both from seeing my peers making comments about our profs (and very disproportionately on the few female profs we had), and from some of my students when I was TA’ing. It’s nice to have some data to back up our reams of anecdotes.
And this gets to the heart of why, in spite of all the support from my friends and evidence in the academic blogging community*, I am still so hesitant when it comes to wearing stylish clothes to campus. It doesn’t get much more male-dominated than my both my old and new fields; there is a grand total of one female professor in my current department, and I’ve been to conferences (in my old field) where I could count the number of women on one hand. I very rarely wore even the slightest heel at my old department, because I felt extremely conspicuous just being a woman.
I was the only female member of my MSc research group in recent memory, in a very esoteric field with some astonishingly smart colleagues. I realized I wanted to do something useful and jumped into a PhD in a field that I had absolutely no background in (and another, though smaller, otherwise all-male research group), in a department that didn’t know me from Eve. It’s always been very important to me to be taken seriously as a scientist, because I feel on some level unqualified to be here, even though I am able to do the work. I have no (or minimal, now) reputation to give me any buffer if I screw up, and so I’m admittedly cautious about the toeing the line between being perceived as stylish and frivolous. On the flip side, I don’t want to be thought of as the woman who got where she was solely because of her charming good looks. I’ve got the publication list to squash that worry pretty flat, but my wardrobe would never pass muster in a peer review.
I find that really frustrating. I’d like to feel comfortable looking like I put effort into how I’m dressed, even though I know I’m never going to be, as my Mom would say, a fashion plate. I’d like to feel comfortable wearing heels to work, even though I probably wouldn’t given how often I run for the bus. I am frustrated with feeling like I have to chose between being taken seriously as a scientist and my wardrobe, because it’s no contest: my perceived academic abilities will win every time. And while it’s nice to have the data to back up the anecdotes, it’s disheartening to know that the anecdotes are accurate, and that my worrying about my wardrobe and my appearance is valid and warranted.
So, what say you? Do you find yourself in a similar situation? Any words of wisdom?
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* I’ve noticed that much of the academic style bloggers I’ve come across are in the humanities or social sciences, with the odd woman in the (usually biological) sciences. I can’t, though, recall seeing anyone in the physical sciences. Have I not stumbled across the fellow physical scientists? Or is this lack of scientists another data point in the “women aren’t taken seriously in male-dominated fields, and don’t want to give the naysayers fodder” dataset? Say hi in the comments, fellow scientists!
These articles are getting around! I was thinking about posting on them after I saw them on Threadbared, and I just finished commenting on Fashionable Academics, and here I am on IA with something different to say based on your point of entry into the issue. (Though I’m in the humanities, so take my thoughts and throw them out the window if you like. I admit I have no scientific evidence to back these claims up, just experiential ones.) : )
All studies aside, I think people react to us most positively when we feel most confident and comfortable with what we are wearing. (Sometimes that kind of confidence can intimidate other powerful people, but I still think the good outweighs the bad.) The longer I’m immersed in academia, the more strongly I believe that academia is fundamentally unfair. The hardest working students don’t get the biggest fellowship packages. The MAs I’d admit to the PhD program sometimes get rejected. New professors get hired at larger salaries than professors who have worked diligently in the department for years. I don’t have the energy to worry myself about all this unfairness, so I choose the only response I know: I work my ass off, I’m kind to my colleagues, and I dress in whatever makes me feel good and professional. I take pride in those things and try to focus on them rather than the external markers of “success.” Let the rest of the chips fall where they may. If academia doesn’t want this version of me, life will go on, and I’ll just have to sweet talk someone in a department nearby to get myself continued access to their libraries.
Yeah, I’m amused how many people’re talking about this study!
I absolutely, ABSOLUTELY agree that academia is unfair in a lot of ways, and that it’s overwhelming to try to worry about it all. I definitely have gone the “work my butt of and be nice to everyone” route, mostly because that’s who I am. Where I’m stuck is that there isn’t really a “professionalness” about dress in my field. I’m so used to wearing fairly casual clothes, that while I feel great when I wear something snappy, I feel uncomfortable because it’s out of my usual range. It’s a transition for me, but the complete lack of conscious dressing (and general lack of women) around me makes it more difficult for me to feel comfortable transitioning, and studying like this don’t help at all.
Long-winded response warning.
Millie, I’m a bioinformatician. That means I’ve experienced the environment of bio and ag departments (scruffy casual on everyone and a department chair with khakis and a beard) and now I work in a College of Computing and Informatics (people who interact with banking and finance and work in computer security and a department chair, Dean and (female) Provost who wear suits daily).
Some of the most stylish women I know are scientists who have made it past the soul-crushing assistant professor phase. The last place that I worked was an old-boy-dominated, conservative Southern ag school, and few of my female colleagues were really happy there, fashionable/attractive or not. You got taken seriously for having funded research, period, and women who were attractive/stylish could certainly earn that respect as much as anyone else. The current place where I work is an urban university, both the biologists and the computer science types here are supportive of female colleagues, and the university policies make it more feasible for women to stay in while having a family, etc. But ultimately, here also, the thing that gets you respect is success. And if you have some measure of that then you just have to own who you are and be confident. Science is very evidence-based, and I’ve always felt from grad school onward that I was taken seriously as long as I could maintain the resume for it. I’ve perceived it when I’ve been in places that were more male-dominated and more hostile, but the essential task is the same — build your own resume and if you can do that, you will find a place that will take you as you are.
What you can wear and be taken seriously is such a secondary problem to the way more serious infrastructural ways that the system makes things difficult for women. However, the only thing that makes a university environment that’s more supportive to women, is more women. Where I am now, our department chair (a man) is very supportive of building a 50/50 faculty and so far we have. But for us to be able to do that, there have to be young women who will just stick it out through the whole apprenticeship process right through the soul-crushing assistant prof stage. Really if you’re tough enough to do that, you’re tough enough to wear what you want and own it.
One of my current female grad students is probably the most stylish person in our department. She dresses well every day and could certainly hold her own amongst the circle of academic style blogs if she wanted to. She gets away with it because her demeanor is serious, when she talks to you she’s confident of her stuff, and perhaps most importantly, she never seems self-conscious about what she’s wearing, no matter what it is. That’s something I wish I could do as well as she does and it’s very important to being able to wear what you want.
I certainly haven’t seen any of you Interrobangs post anything on the blog that seems way out of the range for acceptable young-academic wear. I’m going to say that I don’t think dressing “up” really will hurt you in academia, as long as you are doing well at the rest of the job and you have confidence. There’s more to it than this of course, but I’ve got a proposal to finish up and I’ve used up my share of your electrons today.
Long winded responses are always welcome here!
I actually struggled a lot with leaving my previous field, because I worried about leaving a field with already so few women in it. There is more women in my new field, but still nowhere near parity. Confidence does have a lot to do with it, and it’s a work in progress for me. The more confident I am at my ability to work in my new field, the more comfortable I am dressing more obviously. It’s a work in progress, though, and articles like this do little to help the situation for me.
I’m actually the only Interrobang still in school — the rest have a variety of fantastic jobs.
Millie, thanks for your comment and taking up this issue here. I do think that most people who can hold their own academically will be fine regardless of what they’re wearing. However, I think that there’s probably a large tendency to pre-judge people for dressing outside of the normal range within a department. I think this problem is particularly prevalent in fields that haven’t reached gender parity. While English and many modern languages have 50% or more women in their professorial ranks. Many other disciplines, as you well know, do not. Unfortunately, unless an academic institution has collective bargaining, most female faculty make less than their male counterparts, and starting salaries often have a large impact on salary increases as tenure is reached and time goes by.
Oh, and thechemist-coture (while not a woman) is in the hard sciences, just fyi.
Oh, shame on me for not remembering him!
I agree that for the most part, those who can hold their own academically will do alright, but the prejudging is definitely a big issue. When you’re already an oddity, there’s pressure to represent all of your group, and when the person in question already has biases about women (or any other group) then you’re several notches behind from the get-go. Good point about the collective bargaining — I hadn’t considered that, but I know that there are some universities around here that have unionized faculty, and I’m curious now about the impact that has on hiring practices.
I know I’m not in the same type of situation Millie is describing, having left the world of academia two years ago, but one thing I do notice within my own profession is that, as a museologist, I’ve had several people assume I work in the art world based on how I dress. When people learn that I was a zoologist and now curate (amongst other things) the collecting and interpretation of the natural world, I have gotten those “but you’re stylish” comments at times. I especially notice it when I’m working with colleagues who are dedicated biological scientists – our styles, in general, do seem to be very different. However, I have the luxury of spending my days indoors where a skirt and ballet flats work fine, rather than spending my days outside working in the dirt and grass and poop.
After last night’s episode of Mad Men, I’ve been mulling over the negligible progress we’ve made in our gender relationships since the 1960s, especially in the professional realm. In an earlier episode from this season, psychologist Faye Miller, an attractive and intelligent woman, changes her outfit and removes her jewelry before moderating a work-related focus group. The scene was treated with humor, as if gender relationships had progressed so far since then that old codes of professional interaction – especially as they were enforced upon women – would be laughable to a contemporary audience. If I were to evaluate our current environment according to this article in The Chronicle, I would say style-minded academics everywhere are still in dire straits. However, if I were to evaluate our current environment according to these thoughtful blog posts and comments, I would say there’s a diminishing need to fret. The opinions represented in The Chronicle article have little company, thankfully.
-Anne-Marie
Yeah, there’s definitely a whole lot of pushback around the academic style blogs today! It’s heartening to see I’m in such good company
As a high school science teacher in the physical sciences (earth and environmental), I can unfortunately agree that being stylish is often held against you regardless of your abilities. I have noticed it from both students and teachers but thankfully the students seem to be willing to adjust their preconceived notions once they get to know you. The teachers are an entirely different mess and, in my experience, more difficult to deal with. My department head once complemented me in a department meeting by saying that he expected me to be a pushover and was surprised that I was capable of managing my classroom. What a swell guy… I know better than to take things like that personally but it does get to be annoying.
Regardless, I feel that it’s important to be myself and right now that means that I wear dresses and heals because I like them. That’s enough of a reason. I know that I’m influencing the students I have in class for the better and perhaps those that major in the sciences will have it a little easier than I did. At least I know they have one stylish role model to look back on!
I’ll be returning to grad school full time next year and I’m curious what will happen to my style as a result… Only time will tell!