Dr. Shellie

"Surely you can’t be a full professor?" asked the man on the airplane.

I don’t think he was referring to the formal academic rank. I think (as FSP has talked about before), he was wondering whether I was a "real" professor.

I am still wondering whether to wear suits to work. Or on the airplane.

In a way, it doesn’t matter: the students I teach know that I give them their grades. The PhD students I advise know that I run the lab. Random men on the airplane? Not really a problem.

And yet: it hits me, over and over again, that our society has a hard time believing that 30-something women can be professors. Why am I asked if I am a student every day? Some of my friends claim I look young. I don’t think so. Whenever I ask someone to guess my age, they get it just right (plus or minus two years). I think it just doesn’t occur to anyone that someone who looks like me could be a professor. And when I do wear a suit, I get mistaken for an admissions officer (yes, that too happened on an airplane). 

Made it to New City– we have been unpacking and organizing the house. I also dropped by campus to see my office and lab.

I had been thinking of upgrading my wardrobe so that people would not think I was a student. Now I realize it is futile. On Monday I put on my most respectable outfit and did some errands on campus. The bank teller asked me if I was ready for classes (and no, she did not mean to teach them!) and a person I asked for directions asked if I had just moved here to study (from which I conclude that I look like a young graduate student and/or freshman).

So, either a) I look very young, regardless of outfit, or b) my idea of "respectable outfit" makes me look like a 21-year old. Oh well. I guess I’ll do as the bank teller said, and be happy that I "have good skin."

On the flip side, one of the graduate students in my department who I bumped into said, "Hi, Professor!" when he saw me. So that was fun.

I thought this was an obvious point. But maybe it is not: A tenure rate of less than 50% is not attractive.

Suppose you are 30-something years old, and have moved all over the country and/or world for your career already, having done undergrad, masters, PhD, and postdoc in different locations. Would you rather go to a university where your colleagues expect you to get tenure and will support you in getting there, and the assumption is that unless something goes pretty wrong, you’ll be able to stick around after the first 5-6 years? Where you could maybe buy a house and expect to keep it for a while? Or would you rather go to a university where on average, only 50% of professors get tenure? That’s a one in two chance of getting kicked out.

Some people will always go for the more prestigious university, even if the tenure rate is low. Those universities can offer concrete (if potentially temporary) advantages. But I think that many (in particular, women and two-career couples) who would rather not be subjected to yet another high-stakes "testing" process at this stage of their lives, with the possible downside being  another job search, period of uncertainty, and possible cross-country move five years later.

An amazing thing happened last weekend. I was in the shoe store, hunting for work shoes. It was the type of shoe store where they pay great attention to measuring your feet and describe to you in detail the technical construction of each shoe. All the shoes are ergonomically correct. I tried on a pair of suede sneakers.

"Not right," I said. "These ones don’t make me look older."

A gray-haired woman sitting nearby laughed. "Maybe you could dye your hair gray!" she said.

Another customer asked why I was trying to look older– was it for my job? "That’s right," I said. "I’m trying to look more like a professor."

"Oh, are you a professor?" asked the gray-haired woman. "So am I."

I explained that I was almost a professor, starting in the fall. We started to chat. She told me her name. I realized that she was actually a Very Important Female Professor, someone whose name I knew, who I had read about several times in our university newspaper. She showed me the shoes she was trying on.

"I’m trying to look more authoritative," she said. I found it funny (and somehow comforting) that Very Important Female Professor had exactly the same goals for her shoes as I did. We went about buying our shoes, and chatted some more. On the way out, she paused. "Email me if you want to have lunch some time," she said.

So I did.

Yesterday, I finished selecting students to admit to my group for next year and made several offers. One of the students who I had not admitted emailed me to ask about the status of his application. I told him I would not have room in the group for him, and referred him to a male colleague of mine at another university who was looking for students.

My colleague later thanked me for the referral and sent me the CV of a different student that I might be interested in. The student was a female with an undergraduate degree, as opposed to a having a masters degree already. As he put it, he was unlikely to admit a female undergraduate student and thought she might be better suited for my group, since I was also female.

This struck me as a little odd, so I inquired for details. Was he unlikely to admit female students in general? He explained that he found female students (myself excluded) very timid and not very tough. As a PhD student, he had worked with a female student who reacted very badly to his criticism and left the group. So he did not think he would advise any female students, at least not any time soon.

On the one hand, I thought this was terribly unfair, since his attitude will reduce the chances of women being admitted to his department. More generally, if enough men think like him, it will be very difficult to increase the number of women in the field. On the other hand, I agree with him that he would probably make a poor advisor of female graduate students, and would not recommend female students to work with him.