You May be a Female Professor If...

-- You have been actively leading a large group of colleagues on a complicated project for the past 7 months and then get to hear somebody in a different department reference this project as "Spearheaded by Professor Greybeard", a member of your team who has been largely absent from the process and has nothing to do with leading it.

-- Your local school district bureaucrat addresses letters to you as "Ms. Lastname", while simultaneously sending out an identical letter to your mentor addressed to "Dr. Mentordude".

-- Your students refer to you by your first name, and refer to your male colleague as "Professor Lastname". Bonus points for the random emails you get from prospective students addressed to you as "Mrs. Lastname".

-- Your work is attributed to your male colleague, as in, "Well in that study that Male Colleague did...", when it was actually your study.

-- You and your male colleague collaborate on a consulting project for an independent firm. You send an email to the contact person with a question that you and your colleague have about the project. No response. You wait a few days and send out another email. No response. You try a 3rd time, and no response. You give in and ask your colleague to email the contact person. He does, and gets a response within the hour.

-- You try to chalk this up to coincidence, but it happens over and over again. It happens so regularly that your colleague starts to joke that it is his manliness that gets quick responses.

-- A senior professor in your college finds out that you have children and casually refers to you as being "risky" for having done that before tenure. She does this in front of a group of people, one who happens to be your friend, an untenured male who recently had a baby. His actions aren't described as "risky". The senior professor does, however, coo over cute pictures of your friend's unrisky baby.

-- Visitors to your suite assume that you are the secretary. Putting your title on your door doesn't seem to do anything to change that assumption.

-- When you answer your own phone, the caller asks to speak to the professor.

-- When you are at a professional function with your colleague, a visitor assumes that you are the wife of your colleague and not a professor.

-- You (a secondary content specialist) are at a function with your male colleague (an early childhood, elementary specialist). Everybody at the function keeps referring to you as the early childhood specialist and your colleague as the content specialist.

-- After six years of serving on the same committee with the same set of mathematicians who know you well, they still ask you what you do with elementary teachers, despite having been reminded a dozen times a year that you run the secondary program and have nothing to do with elementary education.

-- You meet somebody new at a conference who has read your papers. He tells you, "I thought for sure that this paper had been written by a man."

-- Any time you are in a working group, you are asked to take notes for the group.

Just a snapshot of my summer!

I know I have it way, way better than some of my friends in other fields. My field is pretty small so as a result, I am mostly known. People know who I am and what I do and what I write about. The smallness of our field means that these kinds of things happen a lot less than they might otherwise, because mostly we are familiar with one another. I would describe most of the things I put up with as generally benign. It could be a lot worse, like some of the stuff that happened to me when I was an undergrad in a math dept.

I think it'll be interesting to see how my responses to stuff may change after tenure. Right now somebody can do practically anything to me and I'm not going to react or put up a fuss because tenure is coming up. I don't want to offend anybody, ever. It'll be interesting to see if, and how, that may change.

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This week I am thrilled because I looked on my calendar and saw that I have no meetings all week! So I decided to refuse any new meeting requests that might come up and work from home all week, doing nothing except writing (okay, and some service tasks, and one critical advising task). Seeing as how I'm not getting paid this month, it seems fitting to avoid meetings and try to focus more on my own work -- if I were smarter, I'd figure out how to pull this off for an entire month instead of just a week.