Why couldn't she just have written 'Dear My-first-name'?

[strange_complex]

I've just received an email from a female student, addressing me as 'Miss X' - not at all an uncommon occurrence. I like to think I'm not the kind of person who would feel the need to go round with a stick up my ass about people getting my title wrong like this - except that the rest of her email goes on to demonstrate perfectly why, nevertheless, I do. Within three sentences, she has gone on to mention (in the context of possible dissertation supervisors for next year) two of my male colleagues - and both of them are referred to, entirely correctly, as 'Dr. Y' and 'Dr. Z'.

Just for the record, it's not that she hasn't had every opportunity of noticing that I am a Doctor, too. She took one of my modules last year, so would have seen it on the module documentation. Meanwhile, this year she is studying in Italy, and as such has received numerous emails from me in my capacity as Study Abroad coordinator, all of which included my full name and title in the signature file. Also, one of the male colleagues she mentions is of a very similar age to me - so this should rule out the possibility that she is assuming I am too young to have become a Doctor yet. All that's left is an apparent unconscious assumption that female academics are not equivalent in status to their male colleagues.

It's not the first time I've seen this, or the first time I've seen it coming from someone who is female themselves. I recognise that a lot of people don't really understand what academic titles mean, or how you earn them. But even if you don't know the fine details, I think it's generally clear enough that 'Doctor' is an honorific, earned title. Seeing female academics regularly stripped of it by underlying assumptions about their intellectual status, while their male colleagues are not, is just one more sign of how unbalanced gender relations continue to be.

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it does. I'm probably particularly sensitive to it today, as a result of having read this (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-solnit13apr13,0,526991.story) (courtesy of matgb) earlier today - but, as I say, I've noticed the exact same phenomenon before anyway, and been annoyed by it. It's the fact that it's so obviously subconscious that really makes it so perfidious.

I'd be interested, actually, to know how often you (or any other male academics reading) get emails from students addressing you as 'Mr. Keen'. I get addressed as 'Miss' or 'Ms' fairly often by students - but of course most of those emails don't also refer to other members of staff, so don't include the stark contrast in forms of address that really annoyed me in this particular one.

[diffrentcolours]

I wish I were a male academic, just so I could say that I don't get e-mails from students addressing me as "Mr Keen".

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Even if you were, I'm sure they'd just write 'Mr. Pedant' instead. ;-p

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Practically never. I strongly discourage that sort of formality with OU students anyway - it seems wrong when many of them are older than me. But even when they are formal, as they often are at the start of the year, it's always 'Dr Keen', and it was always 'Dr Keen' when I taught more traditional undergraduates (except in China, where I was 'Professor Keen'). I really am surprised that anyone wouldn't make the default assumption that anyone on the permanent staff was 'Dr Whoever'.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I followed the link and can feel my blood pressure is elevated. Absolutely bang on. Reminds me of a time when I was at a dinner party hosted by the (academic) parents of a friend I know from Oxford, when we were subjected to a barrage of assumptions from an unbelievably patronising older man about our educations and what we did for a living, bless our little hearts, oh and he was a great reader himself. In the end, she and I stopped him mid-flow and explained that, no, we hadn't gone to sixth-form or secretarial college in Oxford, we'd met when we were both doing doctorates at Oxford, no, not Oxford Brookes, the University of Oxford. His bewilderment was almost painful as he tried to prove to his own satisfaction that we were less clever than we claimed.