What Women Wear
The first day of school is one of my favorite days of the year—it feels like the new year. I make lists, buy new supplies, and cheerily greet my colleagues in the hallway by chirping, “How was your summer?” This day feels full of the same possibility and promise. As on so many first days of school before (somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty of them, counting my days as both student and as teacher), I picked a first-day-of-school outfit. However, my role as a junior faculty member at a university has changed the way I choose clothing. I chose a dress in a dark color—nothing too flashy. The neckline was high and the hemline was low. I wore a cardigan to cover most of my tattoos. I wore my hair up and pinned back, wore glasses while I usually wear contacts, and wore small pearl stud earrings—all of which were an effort to communicate that I could and should be taken seriously. For purposes of comparison, I noticed that two of my male colleagues wore jeans to teach graduate students on the first night of classes.
You might think that this is degree of forethought is unnecessary. Unfortunately, I would counter that I’ve heard too many senior academic men talk about the ways in which women dress and I’ve received too many comments from senior academic women to agree. At conferences, senior male faculty have—in my company—commented on the boring and shapeless pantsuits of their colleagues or on the more contemporary wear of junior colleagues. This clothing, in turn, invites an entirely different kind of commentary which is not centered on the quality of their scholarship.
Senior women also comment on the clothing choices of young colleagues. Permit me to relay an example. I encountered a colleague en route from my campus office to the bathroom last year. Because it is salient to this topic, I’ll recount what I was wearing: dark jeans, heels, a button down, and a blazer. This senior female colleague said something very similar to, “You must not have much going on today—you usually look so put together.” To be clear, I didn’t have much going on that day: I planned several hours of solo writing in my office. I stammered something to this effect, but the message was clear. My appearance had not met the expectations of my senior colleague.
This stuff matters because, in this job, the perceptions of colleagues matter. They are the people who endorse and distribute my research, mentor me, sponsor me for increasingly prestigious opportunities, and ultimately vote on my tenure. It also matters because it speaks to a mindset that is still all too prevalent in academic spaces, be they K12 or higher education. Emma Rees writes about this in her article, “Clothes do not make the woman: what female academics wear is subject to constant scrutiny,” which had me nodding vigorously in agreement. Women’s deviations in appearance are judged harshly because, in short, they are reminders that women are not men and “…fundamentally, they don’t have the right bodies to be academic authorities.”
Rees also discusses, with some distress, the fact that universities are often considered progressive and liberal spaces which are supposed to permit greater degrees of self-expression and judge individuals based on the rigor of their scholarship rather than the quality of their dress. Sadly, even we denizens of the academy are still bound by ancient notions of what academics look like. Too often, as well, coded comments about clothing and appearance veil additional biases about age, race, and ability. The microaggressions present in these judgments are not new, but they are continued evidence of the ways in which women, non-binary individuals, and people of color bear a greater burden of “proof”—which includes the ways in which they present themselves—that they are not only qualified and capable, but that their bodies are also those of qualified, capable people.
What, then, shall we do? The degree of metacognition with which I approached my own clothing choices on the first day of school were a reminder to me of the appearance-based privileges I do possess within my workplace (for example, I am white and cis-gender). They were a prompt to me to check the biases I may bring to my assessments of my colleagues and to redirect conversations that do center on appearance, especially of people who are not male or white. And, while I am not yet secure enough to gleefully resist the many gazes I encounter, I can work to ensure that my own gaze does not contribute to the notion that what women wear is an indicator of their value, worth, or skill.