There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress:
Let’s start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are most likely going to be doing a lot of walking. In a city. Often in the cold (though not this year!). While it is certainly inappropriate to come in your Wellies, teetering into the room on heels that are as stable as a university’s endowment sends the message that you might not be a terribly practical person. What does practicality have to do with your ability to teach first-year composition or an introduction to American lit? Maybe nothing. But it does make me wonder how helpful you will be on a departmental committee that has to plan an assessment project, or if you can be counted on to perform the day-to-day service activities required of faculty. If you cannot make practical choices in footwear, how practical in daily, non-cerebral tasks will you be?
I would like to be able to say that I have never mentally downgraded a job candidate because of how they were dressed, but I can’t. Not because I ever did downgrade a person based on their attire, but because I honestly can not remember anything about how any of the candidates we have interviewed were dressed. I’m sure they were wearing something, but I couldn’t begin to tell you whether it was a suit or something else, let alone what sort of shoes they were wearing.
Now this shouldn’t be taken as a claim of personal nobility, that I’m above petty issues about clothing– it’s just obliviousness. I am 1) male, 2) an academic, and 3) a physicist, so I am basically the central overlap region on the Venn diagram of Ultimate Fashion Cluelessness. I do notice some things, but this is really a threshold process– as long as the candidate passes a fairly low level of inoffensive semi-formality, I don’t much care about the details.
Interestingly, though, another of my blog stops yesterday was the Genomic Repairman post on the grad school cost of living, where I really did downgrade the post based on a first impression. The post is written as advice to undergrad students considering grad school, and does a reasonable job of laying out the financial realities. He lost me, though, at this bit:
Rent: I paid $700 a month for my apartment that was surrounded by you cockbites.
Prior to that, I had been thinking of it as at least Links Dump material, and maybe worth a full post (my expense breakdown was a little different than what he talks about). Right there, though, my reaction shifted to “Really? ‘Cockbites?’ That’s where you want to go with this? Thoughtless sexual slurs?” I finished the post, but closed the tab without tagging it, and only re-opened it later after running into the fashion advice from IHE.
The contrast between my reactions to these is sort of interesting to me (and may or may not be interesting to anybody else, but, hey, it’s my blog…). In a way, both the fashion penalty Nicolas talks about and my reaction to the language of the Repairman’s post are superficial first impressions– the casual slurs don’t affect the validity of the financial argument any more than wearing separates rather than a suit should affect the decision to hire somebody. But I’m bothered much more by the language than by the clothing of job candidates.
It’s not that I find profanity totally abhorrent, either. In fact, it’s a struggle for me to moderate my language when SteelyKid is around– I reflexively curse quite a bit, and she’s in a phase where she imitates a lot of what we say. I’d rather not send her to day care cursing like a sailor. I’m not opposed to the strategic use of profanity on-line or in person– the occasional curse dropped into a discussion of something can be a good way to get a class’s attention.
In the end, I think it’s more the attitude reflected by the language than the language itself. That sort of casual slur– and there are a few others sprinkled through that post– bespeaks a certain contempt for the audience, which makes me wonder why I would want to take the advice of a person who clearly thinks ill of the reader. Or why I would want to recommend that sort of advice to somebody else via the blog.
(And yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying that in a post where I link to the post in question. This is primarily about my thought processes, so the link is relevant. And the information, stripped of the juvenile attitude, is pretty good and useful.)
This is indicative of an evolution of my thinking about how to approach online interaction over the last fifteen years or so. Back in my Usenet days, I was much more inclined to pepper my posts with obscenities, and be directly insulting to people I was arguing with. As the blog has evolved over the years, though, I’ve dropped most of that. Because, ultimately, the goal of the blog is to communicate something to people, not to earn Clever Points by demonstrating my facility with profanity. This is going to be available to a huge number of people, some of whom won’t be particularly impressed by using “fuck” as an adverb, so unless there’s some good reason for it, I try to keep things relatively clean. There are other ways to demonstrate linguistic dexterity, when I feel the need.
As I said, though, this is a relatively recent development, and the collision of these two posts really kind of brought home to me the degree to which I’m a different person than I was in my Usenet heyday. Fifteen years ago, I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed the language in the post to find it offensive. And I’m sure there are still a whole bunch of people reading blogs who find that sort of thing entertaining– I’ve just moved out of the target demographic for that blog.
I hope to God I never move into the demographic where I evaluate job candidates on the style of their shoes, though. Because, really, that’s just ridiculous.
My favorite quotation about profanity is from Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut:
“… profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.”
Right there, though, my reaction shifted to “Really? ‘Cockbites?’ That’s where you want to go with this? Thoughtless sexual slurs?”
Second this. It’s not offensive because it’s profanity, it’s offensive because it’s a completely gratuitous sexual slur. That makes it a perfectly good reason to downrate the post.
I also generally agree with your take on the sartorial advice column. I’ll grant that things might well be different in liberal arts land (unlike physics, English-type departments combine their interview sessions with the big annual conference in their field, and certainly economics/business departments are reasonable in expecting people to wear suits at interviews), but in physics the thresholds for suitable clothing IME aren’t all that great. The one thing I’ll add to your take is to agree with Dean Dad’s comment on the article: if you’re not comfortable wearing whatever clothes you’re wearing, I *will* notice that.
Despite engineers being clueless, I’ve noticed the bar is pretty high for candidate dress. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that engineering is tied in with business quite a bit.
And the shoe bit is stupid. I am not above putting dress shoes in a bag for a formal event later while wearing my sneakers (or snow boots) to and from. I actually think that’s a quite pragmatic approach (although society abolishing the use of heels altogether would probably be more practical).
I also agree: insulting your audience isn’t the best way to go. 🙂
My intellectual ideal has always been to have whatever set of formality standards make the world easy to navigate for me, but to not give a flying fig over other people’s. It’s remarkably hard to keep standards from creeping up or down though.
I have to say I completely misread that passage. It entered my brain as “surrounded by cockroaches,” as a comment on the quality of the housing a grad school student would have to endure. Eep.
I took marks off for “You are going to loose money,” mainly because that one got rubbed raw through misuse on dozens of tests I graded.
On the shoe thing. I have a friend who is an opera singer and who has also taught young singers and auditioned them. She said too often she sees young women who have no idea how to walk in heels wearing them. So when she teaches, she talks about what students should wear to auditions, and how to wear heels without teetering, wobbling, stomping, gallumphing, or otherwise looking like you raided your mama’s closet.
I second Cherish’s point about walking shoes and dress shoes; and also second Eric’s point about the importance of looking comfortable in what you’re wearing. That would include looking like you know how to wear it. Otherwise, I too would wonder about someone if she came in to an interview wearing heels that she was ‘teetering’ on and looked unstable in. You’ve got to wear clothes you can handle; not everyone can walk well in heels and it’s just distracting and somewhat unnerving as you wonder if someone is about to sprain an ankle before your eyes.
If she walked in with ease and confidence, though, that’s a different story.
Ah yes, the old I-couldn’t-care-less claim. Dodgy. Why do women in physics usually dress so shabbily? Because how they get treated SO depends on how they dress. So much for your neutrality. Oh, I get it. You were really only thinking of the men.
“Why do women in physics usually dress so shabbily? Because how they get treated SO depends on how they dress.”
WTF? If that’s so, why would they dress shabbily? Or is my sarcasm meter broken again? I’d rather my colleagues dress comfortably so that they can place their full attention on their work. If the job doesn’t require it, there shouldn’t be constraints on dressing.
@8 Women dress ‘shabbily’ in physics because to do otherwise tends to draw a rather significant amount of unwelcome attention to themselves.
Ah what to wear!
For women only.
For anything in the sciences: really plain and sensible (flat shoes, neutral colours, shapeless), lest you attract attention to your ‘feminine attributes’. Intelligent women don’t do that.
Anything in the arts: quirky and non-conformist(colourful/bohemian, feathers, red/purple streaks in hair), lest you create the impression of being boring. Boring women have no passion and are well, conformist.
Anything in the business related field: smart and high heels (tailored, but not tight, dark conservative colours, perfect hair), lest you create the impression of not being confident or able to afford an expensive hairdresser. If you can wear really high heels with panache it must mean you can sell anything confidently.
It’s simple really.
Despite engineers being clueless, I’ve noticed the bar is pretty high for candidate dress. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that engineering is tied in with business quite a bit.
I think it’s more about respect for the employer and not knowing if you’re interviewing with lab-working engineers, office-working engineering managers, the HR people, the VP of engineering on a really slow day, or what.
That’s what it is for me when I interview. I can always dress down after I get the job.
Could someone please enlighten me? What is a “cock bite”? That particular piece of slang has not travelled across the Atlantic.
I agree I think women in Physics tend to dress the way they do because to do otherwise would be pushing against the norm.
Amen on the language-moderation-around-kids point..
I do a lot of puttering around the house on home improvement type projects, the sort of thing that tends to naturally lead to the occasional pithily profane outburst, and although I thought I was being relatively careful about letting loose outside of my five year old daughter’s hearing, I must have dropped an f-bomb or two where she could pick it up…
The end result was several very earnest conversations about how the f-bomb was probably not the most appropriate general addition to a four year old’s lexical repertoire.