Julia Baird on brandishing titles like a torch

I remember the first time it happened: I was sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office, flipping through a magazine and trying to ignore the usual daytime television drivel, not exactly dreading my dental work but not much looking forward to it either, when the friendly hygienist opened the door and called for "Dr. Hogue."

Did you hear that? Not "Miss Hogue" or "Ms. Hogue" or "Bev" but "Dr. Hogue." I'm not a fool: living in Appalachia, I know there's no better way to alienate my neighbors than to brandish my academic credentials in public, but on the other hand, it feels good to occasionally receive a little professional respect, even in the dentist's waiting room. 

In today's New York Times, Julia Baird examines what happens when that respect breaks down (read it here).  In "Women, Own Your 'Dr.' Titles," Baird explains, "It had never occurred to me to add 'Ph.D.' to my name on Twitter until I was slammed for mentioning that I had one." Daring to assert her credentials subjected her to online attacks from those who "viewed the degree not as a sign of expertise but as a provocation, a pretension."

Academics were divided in their response to the uproar, "with a horde of women revealing that they, too, had been taunted for using their titles, while many men who had not received such criticism were baffled." She offers examples of the unequal treatment of men's and women's titles in media and academe, but I just sat there nodding, recalling the former administrator who consistently used "Dr." only for male academics, referring to women at every rank as "Professor." Nothing wrong with "Professor," but why the gendered distinction? And then there are the relatives who will introduce my husband as Rev. Hogue and me as just plain old Bev.

I'm happy to be plain old Bev in most settings, so I don't get bent out of shape when the "Dr." gets dropped, but Baird is correct in connecting this lack of professional respect with the long history of disregard for women's voices. This whole conversation harks back to Rebecca Solnit's essay "Men Explain Things to Me," in which she describes an encounter with a man who doubted her expertise on the topic of a book that she had written. "Every woman knows what I'm talking about," writes Solnit:

It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment in the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

Julia Baird's encounter with online trolls who doubt her expertise is just the next step in this progression. "For centuries," she writes, "the voices of women have been muted, discounted and minimized. Our right to speak has been questioned, our power undermined, our authority mocked....We are repeatedly told to apologize, to shrink, to shut up."

"So don't," she commands, and let's give Dr. Baird the respect of allowing her to have the last word:

You don't need a title to speak. But if you have one, use it. Find your voice, and raise it. Stake your authority, and state it. Don't recoil. Don't back down.

Sometimes authority should be worn lightly. But sometimes it should be brandished like a torch.