Strategies for young-looking academics

Me, front, far left, as 4th year assistant professor (everyone in photo now has PhD, though only 2 of us did at the time).

I became an assistant professor about a month before my 30th birthday. On my first day teaching (a large gen ed class), I was standing at the front of the room somewhat nervous. A student approached me, and I had a moment of excitement – my first official question from a student as a professor! Then the question: “Do you know if he is going to give us the syllabus?” I couldn’t even process the question and asked her to repeat it. When I finally realized what she was asking, I lamely replied “I’M the professor!” and she slithered away.

A week later, at an event for first year honors students, one of my colleagues introduced herself to me, assuming I was a… first year honors student.

Before age 40, I always looked young. I have always been short (no improvement post-40). As a child and teenager everyone assumed I was much younger than my age. In grad school everyone assumed I was an undergrad. I was carded well into my 30’s, and occasionally after 40 in really poor lighting.

Me, right, college freshman (genes are strong; my father was 45 in this photo).

So, this recent post about women who look young in academia definitely hit home. She makes a number of excellent points about gender role expectations, how youth is – and isn’t – valued, and issues of status and expectations. I won’t repeat those issues here. What I want to share here are my experiences with this issue, and how I have addressed it.  

The experiences didn’t stop at my first couple of weeks as assistant professor. They continued, both in my teaching and research life. At conferences when I presented, people would ask me “Who do you work with?”

As an instructor, I had difficulty getting students to treat me with respect. Students would call me “Eva” and call male assistant professor colleagues “Professor X.”  I would receive very informal emails. Students would sometimes interrupt my lectures to make jokes (some of which were inappropriate). I also would get comments in my student evaluations that made it clear students perceived me as young. The one I will never forget: “She expected us to call her Dr., and that’s ridiculous. Dr. is a title you earn, you don’t just get to be called it.” Somehow my 6 years in a doctoral program were wiped away by a student who thought I was too young to be a Dr.

I was (mostly) able to turn it around, especially on the teaching front. Here are some of the things I did, some of which overlap with the advice in the post I linked to above:

• I stopped putting my first name on the syllabus. Viewing it here, it seems bratty, but it worked when I wrote the following on my syllabus:

Professor:                           Dr. E. Lefkowitz                                

Pronunciation:                  DOK-ter LEF-coe-wits

• I also wrote it on the board the first day, and made a couple of jokes about how not to pronounce it (not Lef-cow-ski; not Lewinsky [it was a long time ago]). Students got the point. Now that I’m older, I don’t care if students call me Eva. But when I was in my early 30’s it mattered, and it felt as though the use of Eva was part of a pattern rather than a word choice.
• I started signing my emails “Dr. L.” I didn’t mind being called Dr. L if they had trouble pronouncing my last name.
• More generally, I made it very clear in the syllabus what my expectations were for student behavior in the classroom.
• I wore my glasses on teaching days. And usually pulled my hair back into a rather severe ponytail.  These two things, while perhaps not exactly aging me, did give me a more librarian look, which helped.
• I also started wearing rather conservative suits or slacks and sweaters on teaching days. I was careful not to wear anything tight, short, or basically, very fashionable.  I always wore heels, usually giving myself a minimum of 2 inches.
• I dressed similarly for conferences, always trying to look very professional and relatively conservative. If I had a poster, I added “Ph.D.” to my name. If I gave a talk, I did the same in my slides. I made sure in my presentations to thank my students and colleagues at the start. And if someone I met at a conference asked me whom I worked with, I would say, “I work with a number of graduate students in our program – do you know some of them?”

I’m sure there are other things I did, but it’s been almost a decade since I felt like it was really an issue, so I don’t remember everything I did.

With time (and wrinkles), my work self has evolved closer to “me” and less of a persona of “female professor.”  Students can call me by my first name if they choose. I’m a bit more relaxed and casual in the classroom. I have moved away from the librarian look, rarely wear my glasses or my hair back, and wear the clothes I want, though I almost never wear jeans or casual clothing to the office.

Would it be better if we lived in a world where we didn’t have to think about these things? Sure. But was my teaching and professional life easier after I made these changes? Absolutely. 

“The post Strategies for young looking academics first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on August 6, 2014.”