Mind the respect gap

There’s a woman I know who does a lot of broadcast interviews, because she’s an expert on something that’s often in the news. And she’s noticed something annoying: the interviewers she talks to—not all of them, but quite a few—are in the habit of addressing her with just her first name, whereas the male experts on the same programme are typically given an academic title. ‘Thank you, Dr Jones. Now Sarah, if I could turn to you…’.  ‘I’m not usually precious about titles’, she says, ‘but I’ve got a Ph.D too’.

Sarah’s experience is not unusual. I regularly get emails from students which hail me as ‘Ms’ or ‘Mrs’ Cameron, though my official title (‘Professor’) is on everything from my office door to the university website. Do the same students address my male colleagues as ‘Mr’? I have no way of knowing, but I doubt it happens very often. The writer and university teacher Rebecca Schuman agrees, reporting that she often hears male faculty members referred to as ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’ by people who routinely address her as ‘Ms Schuman’. ‘It happens all the time’, she emphasises, ‘and I often hear a sneer in the “izzzzz”’.

This isn’t just an issue in academia. It’s also been noted in another titled profession, medicine. In a study published earlier this year, researchers analysed video-recordings of a medical ritual known as Grand Rounds—a sort of regular mini-conference where hospital doctors present recent cases to their colleagues and medical students. They focused on the part of the proceedings where presenters are introduced by a colleague, and recorded, for each introduction sequence, whether the introducer named the presenter as ‘Dr X’, ‘Joe/Joanne X’ or ‘Joe/Joanne’. Then they crunched the numbers to see how the choice was affected by the sex of the introducer and the presenter. They found a clear pattern: in a context where every speaker is by definition ‘Dr X’, women were significantly less likely to be referred to by that title.

Actually, that wasn’t the only noteworthy finding, so let’s just unpack some of the details. The researchers found that women performing introductions at Grand Rounds nearly always introduced presenters, of both sexes, as ‘Dr X’: they used first names in just four cases out of a total of 106. Male introducers had a much lower overall usage of ‘Dr’ (which suggests that in general they favoured a more informal style), but the sex of the presenter made a significant difference. Men used ‘Dr’ far more frequently when introducing other men (72%) than when introducing women (49%).  It’s true that factors other than sex might play some part in this: we know, for instance, that the use of titles is influenced by age and professional status/seniority (variables which unfortunately this study did not investigate). But while those variables might account for some proportion of the male/female difference, at this point in the history of medicine it seems unlikely they could explain it all. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s a tendency for men to withhold professional recognition from women, because subconsciously they don’t regard women as equals.

The pattern revealed by this study is reminiscent of some other patterns I’ve discussed in earlier posts, like the tendency for men to dominate discussion in professional contexts and their habit of using endearment terms like ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart’ to female co-workers. It’s more evidence of what we might call, by analogy with the gender pay gap, the gender respect gap: other things being equal, women get less respect than men. But what I want to talk about in this post isn’t just the title-vs-first naming pattern itself–I’m sure that will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog. It’s also my own (and I think, many other feminists’) ambivalence about it.

When I first read the Grand Rounds study, I thought: ‘yes, that’s happened to me’—and then I thought, ‘and actually I’ve been complicit in it’. I don’t think I’ve ever asked a media interviewer or the person introducing me at a conference to use my academic title rather than my first name. If students send emails to ‘Ms Cameron’ I normally let that pass too. And if I do ever feel moved to say something, I have the same impulse Sarah had to preface my complaint with a disclaimer: ‘I’m not usually precious about titles, but…’.  I don’t think this is because I suffer from that much-discussed female malady, impostor syndrome (‘don’t mind me, I shouldn’t really have this title anyway’). It’s more that, on the question of professional titles, feminists are caught between a political rock and a hard place.

As I’ve explained before, what address terms convey depends not only on which terms you choose, but also on whether or not they’re used reciprocally. Reciprocal usage of titles signals mutual respect between equals, along with a degree of social distance and formality; non-reciprocal usage (e.g., you call me ‘Professor’ but I call you ‘Susie’) suggests a status hierarchy in which one person must defer to the other. With first names and endearment terms, reciprocal usage signals intimacy or solidarity, whereas non-reciprocal usage, once again, implies a hierarchy. This dual-axis system (status versus solidarity, hierarchy versus equality) is what makes professional titles potentially a difficult area for feminists to negotiate. We may resent being addressed as ‘Sarah’ when the man beside us is ‘Dr Jones’, but we also tend to be uncomfortable demanding deference from others. We’re in favour of equality and reciprocity, not hierarchy.

This isn’t just a feminist thing. For people of my generation (I was born in the late 1950s), the use of first names rather than titles was one symbolic expression of the egalitarian values championed by progressive social movements in the 1960s and 70s. By the time I went to university in 1977, our teachers divided neatly along generational lines. The old guard maintained the traditional etiquette of distance and deference (we called them Dr/Professor, they called us either by our given names, or in some cases Mr/Miss), while the young Turks marked their cool, lefty credentials by telling us to call them ‘Bob’ (obviously they weren’t all named Bob, but they were, almost without exception, men).

Of course, this didn’t mean there was no hierarchy—the Bobs were marking our exams, not vice versa—but we liked the idea that they were treating us as equals, and encouraging us, as we also used to say, to ‘relate to them as people’. So when I became a lecturer myself, I found it natural to ask my own students to use my first name. As I saw it, insisting on a title meant you were old and out of touch, not to mention self-regarding and/or socially conservative. I wanted to make clear that I was none of those things.

The trouble is that, like so many symbolic gestures, this one doesn’t work for women or minorities the same way it works for white men—a point made forcefully by the Australian academic Katrina Gulliver, who explicitly takes issue with the young Turk tendency:

In most departments there is the species of (white) male professor, who wants to be seen as “cool” (you know the one, who shows up dressed like he’s come to mow the lawn), who invites all the youngsters to “call me Dave,” resting safely in the comfort of assumed male authority. If you’re one of these guys: you are not helping the rest of us.

Gulliver got a lot of flak for this, with many commenters telling her that she just didn’t understand Australian culture (she mentioned in the piece that she had previously worked in Germany). We’re more relaxed here, they said, we don’t go in for all that stuffy formality. But while it’s true there are cultural differences, we should be suspicious of the claim that first-naming is just about informality. Findings like the ones reported in the Grand Rounds study show that this isn’t the whole story: there really is a gender respect gap, and the ‘let’s not fixate on titles’ argument is too often trotted out on autopilot by people who don’t want to acknowledge that or to think about its real-world consequences. People like Will Miller, whose response to Gulliver was this:

I worry about making sure I deserve the respect of my students rather than expecting my title or position to simply demand it. I want students to respect me as an individual, not solely for my role, title, or degrees.

This pious sentiment is hard to argue with, because today it is a truism that people should be respected for what they do rather than who they are, what they wear or what title they go by (whether that’s ‘Lord Muck’ or ‘Professor Miller’). But while in principle feminists also subscribe to this belief, we have reason to know that in practice respect, like money, is not distributed purely on the basis of individual merit.

Rebecca Schuman’s answer to Miller was scathing: ‘It takes a particularly privileged individual’, she commented, ‘to insist, though he commands unearned respect when he walks into a room (even in jeans), that respect must be earned’. Her point was that the Bobs, Daves and Will Millers can have their cake and eat it too. As members of the social group that provides our cultural template for authority, they can expect to retain students’ respect while also getting extra credit for not insisting on the deference to which their status in theory entitles them. Women, on the other hand, have often discovered that a symbolic display of humility from them is interpreted less as principled egalitarianism and more as a confirmation of their assumed inferior status. When it comes to authority, Katrina Gulliver suggests, a woman must either use it or lose it:

So, I’ll keep insisting on formality from my students, even if they make comments about my being pedantic or bossy on their student evaluations.

But that ‘if’ clause points to a further complication. A woman who is—in Sarah’s words—‘precious about titles’ does risk being labelled bossy (not to mention arrogant, unfriendly and uncool). She can easily be cast as one of the stereotypical ‘nasty women’—the schoolmarm, the nagging nanny or the hideous old battleaxe—who turn up with such monotonous regularity in cultural representations of powerful women. All her options have costs as well as benefits; for her there is no magic ‘get out of jail free’ card. So what, in practice, should women do?

What I do myself is what I’ve always done: I ask students to use my first name, and—since language is my subject—I take a moment to discuss with them what this might communicate in the specific context of higher education (not that I want to be their friend, but that I recognise them as fellow-adults and expect them to act accordingly). I have never, personally, had much trouble with students being openly disrespectful: the sexism I’ve encountered has been more the ‘she’s a scary old battleaxe’ variety. At my advanced age and career stage, I can live with that (which is not to say I like it or think it’s fair). But when I read about other women’s experiences, I do wonder if I’m doing a disservice to my colleagues—especially the young women and women of colour who are likely to encounter a more extreme version of the respect gap.

I’m under no illusion that language on its own can close the gap. As I’ve said more than once on here, patterns of language-use do not arise in a social vacuum: ultimately I don’t think there is any kind of sexism which can be effectively addressed using purely linguistic measures. But language is part of the bigger picture. Is it incumbent on all of us to be ‘precious about titles’ so that the larger message about equality comes across more clearly and consistently? So that a title like ‘professor’ will stop automatically conjuring up a picture of a middle-aged white man in a tweed jacket?

I’m not sure what the answer is, and to be honest I can’t see myself changing the professional habit of a lifetime. But writing this has prompted me to make one new resolution. The next time I hear a woman expert being treated like Sarah—first-named by a media presenter who uses formal/deferential address terms with the male experts on the programme—I’m going to complain. And before you ask, yes, I’ll be signing the complaint ‘Professor’.

The comic book image in this post shows the 1940s character Jill Trent, Science Sleuth.

 

 

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