Member-only story
When the world doesn’t take you seriously
You don’t need respect from everyone in order to succeed
“She barely looks old enough to drive, but she’s a professor.” That’s how one of our deans liked to introduce new faculty at the fall convocation every August. Especially when we were fresh out of grad school, or didn’t have enough facial hair.
Plenty of us have had this kind of problem. Either you look too young, too female, too small, too heavy, or too…something. Whatever it is, not everyone recognizes all the respect or authority you deserve.
They don’t take you seriously. Maybe they never will.
Other people might go a step further, and undermine you constantly. Maybe they don’t do it on purpose. I’m sure the dean was just joking when he suggested I or other young people didn’t look like real faculty. But it’s a little tone deaf these days to introduce a professor as if she were your teenage daughter. Maybe, just a little bit?
This happens to me more than I’d like. Despite everything, people interrupt me during conversations and talk over me during meetings. Not all the time, but enough to get on my nerves. They don’t mean to act that way. But when they look at me, their first instinct is to ask where my parents are — not my thoughts on budgets or job candidates.
