{"id":1594,"date":"2016-07-09T19:54:59","date_gmt":"2016-07-09T18:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2016-07-09T19:54:59","modified_gmt":"2016-07-09T18:54:59","slug":"dressing-for-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2016\/07\/09\/dressing-for-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Dressing for Success?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Women\u2019s attire is so often the focus of media attention. I expect the relative merits of Andrea Leadsom’s and Theresa May\u2019s wardrobes will be dissected as front page news for weeks, along with Angela Eagle\u2019s. Focus on the importance of clothing in the job market was recently highlighted in research<\/a> from the Paris-Sorbonne University, which apparently showed that women who wear low-cut tops in photographs attached to their job applications are up to five times more likely to receive an interview invitation than those with round-neck clothing. I\u2019m not sure what sort of jobs were under consideration, but as scientists, or indeed any sort of academic, does it matter how we dress? \u00a0Is it too na\u00efve to think that the evidence of merit should trump any superficial decisions based merely on clothing?<\/p>\n

There was some discussion about the significance of this point in the comment stream on an early post<\/a> of mine.\u00a0 As gerty-Z<\/a>\u00a0 said in those comments<\/p>\n

Professional attire can be\u2026tricky<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She highlighted the issue of safety in particular: long floaty dresses, currently back in fashion, might be regarded as a case in point here, and open-toed sandals are certainly banned from many, possibly all, labs. But there are other reasons beyond safety for thinking carefully about one\u2019s attire and the messages which may be conveyed, intentionally or otherwise, by one\u2019s sartorial choice.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with those interviews. A while back US blogger Female Science Professor <\/a>posed the question on Scientopia\u00a0 of what one should wear for an academic job interview, and specifically whether a suit (and tie) should be worn.\u00a0 The answers were collated here<\/a>,\u00a0 where I was surprised to see that Astronomy seemed to be singled out as a sub-discipline where suits should not<\/u> be worn. Even more troubling \u2013 to my mind \u2013 was the response from an anonymous respondent<\/p>\n

Call me old fashioned, but i believe that females should wear something a little sexy and wear some subtle makeup. I really think this helped me with being accepted to 3 TT [tenure track] jobs in earth science.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually old-fashioned is not what I\u2019d call it, but inappropriate. It really worries me that someone felt that sexy was the right way to set about getting an academic job, possibly even worse that they felt they\u2019d succeeded three<\/u> times; this is where conflicting messages may arise. If you wear (and I\u2019m assuming<\/strong> the respondent was female) a sexy little number what are you subliminally saying about yourself to the interview panel?<\/p>\n

Get me on your faculty and at the very least I\u2019ll be a sight for sore eyes at faculty meetings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Surely not what you want to convey! These are jobs about science, so in my book the message should be<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a serious professional, this job is important to me so I have taken the trouble to brush my hair and find some clean and smart clothes, but what I want you to do is concentrate on my science so listen hard\u2026.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clothes should not be distracting the panel \u2013 and the interviewee presumably just assumed the panel would be at least mainly male, which I would like to believe will in itself be a miscalculation \u2013 but neutral.\u00a0 Some of the commenters on my earlier post absolutely saw any personal remarks about their clothes as demeaning and inappropriate in a professional setting (though probably not at the Christmas party), so one must assume that implicitly they wanted their clothes not<\/u> to be the story in such a setting, interview or not.<\/p>\n

Received wisdom has it that it takes less than 10 seconds to form an opinion of someone based on their overall appearance, and that certainly includes dress. If you want to be taken seriously \u2013 at a conference, in a committee meeting or indeed at an interview \u2013 it\u2019s worth thinking carefully about what that first impression might be. Hence I do think it matters what we wear; and I\u2019m inclined to think it matters more for women than for men. Maybe I\u2019ll be shouted down on this, although clearly Laura Bates agrees with me in her piece<\/a> discussing the Sorbonne research I allude to above.\u00a0 Nevrtheless, it is true that for men too there are issues.<\/p>\n

The late lamented David Mackay<\/a>\u00a0 absolutely changed his style of dress when he became Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. He moved on from the shorts and sandals that had been his customary accoutrements when a mere professor in the Cavendish, switching them for wearing an unexceptionable and unmemorable suit and tie. He knew most civil servants would take him less seriously if he were so \u2018peculiar\u2019 as to turn up in the ministry dressed in his younger self\u2019s garb.\u00a0 Many other academic males I know have replaced the jeans and T-shirt of their youth for something more conventional, be it a full-blown suit or just an open-necked collared shirt coupled with trousers rather than jeans, in order to convey greater gravitas.\u00a0 However, one problem I see for women is that, because they have a wider variety of outfit types on offer to them, which convey different degrees of (in)formality, there is more scope for \u2018getting it wrong\u2019 than the simple uniform of a suit (or not) for men.<\/p>\n

When I was a postdoc at Cornell at the tender age of 24, and hence much younger than the average US postdoc, I learnt that dressing like a student (i.e. wearing jeans) led to trouble: people didn\u2019t believe I was<\/u> a postdoc. The most memorable occasion on which this was manifest was when, in the Faculty Library (I was at that point in an Engineering department) I was accused of stealing my husband\u2019s library card because, as a postdoc, I had a faculty rather than student card (OK my name may have confused them too, as Athene is just plain odd and Donald is obviously a bloke\u2019s name). Nevertheless, thereafter I vowed not to wear jeans again and look less than my age \u2013 or status \u2013 and have stuck to that ever since even though it seems improbable I would be mistaken for a typical student anymore!<\/p>\n

With only 10 seconds in which an unconscious mental pigeonholing takes place in the brain, your appearance and not your words of wisdom will be the dominant component of the impression you leave with someone when you meet them for the first time. Not for nothing was First Impressions the original title of the novel Pride and Prejudice. It is one form of unconscious bias that we probably all suffer from. So is \u2018sexy\u2019 the first message you want to give, or \u2018young and scatty\u2019 or even \u2018hippy\u2019? Wouldn\u2019t it be better to come across as \u2018serious, clever and competent\u2019? But I absolutely don\u2019t think that means that all women of whatever age should dress in unrelenting black and reach for the horn-rimmed glasses. In fact, very much the contrary. For situations other than an interview, such as speaking at a conference or sitting on a committee, both situations in which in my field women remain a minority, wearing something bright may actually mean that people are more likely to remember you, something that has the potential to be a future advantage. I know a woman who dresses in a conservative trouser suit \u2013 it just happens to be bright red, a colour she can carry off.<\/p>\n

As far as I am concerned the bottom line is that one should not only be comfortable in one\u2019s clothes but also should be comfortable with the message they give out. \u00a0People may remember the clothes and, as with a police caution, use it against you in the future.\u00a0 There is no single way of being right, but there are definitely many ways of being \u2018wrong\u2019. But I hope such factors do not decide who becomes the next Prime Minister.<\/p>\n

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Women\u2019s attire is so often the focus of media attention. I expect the relative merits of Andrea Leadsom’s and Theresa May\u2019s wardrobes will be dissected as front page news for weeks, along with Angela Eagle\u2019s. Focus on the importance of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,27],"tags":[357,359,358],"class_list":["post-1594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-culture","category-women-in-science","tag-job-interviews","tag-professionalism","tag-suits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}