Remember a few days ago, when a reader wanted some advice regarding what to do when people use the wrong title? You might be wondering what happened as a result of all your excellent advice. Well, now we know:
I thought readers might be interested in the rest of the Dr/Mrs saga. Remember? The person who addressed me as Mrs after seeing my name on an academic website in connection with a conference I was organising? [And thanks to everyone for the wonderful comments and suggestions!!!!!]
In the end I chose the nice approach. I wrote ‘Dear Dr xxxx’ and mentioned in the email both how organising this conference was part of my post-doctoral research project, and that I had done my PhD in this topic. (hint, hint, hint)
His response was stunning. It went:
“Dear Ms/Mrs [my lastname], Dear [firstname], rest email”
I am completely and utterly baffled. I really don’t know what to say. I think I am just going to file this in my head as an anomaly.
Anyway, i thought the site might want to be updated on the result – with thanks again for posting and commenting.
Wait… so he decided that he was talking to two people instead of one? That’s so weird.
I think it is common when moving from ‘official address’ to ‘less offical addres’ to state ‘dear [title] [last name], dear [first name]‘. I have seen it done before and think it is fine – it introduces familiarity without not acknowledging formality/title.
What stuns me is that the offical address has moved from Mrs to Mrs/Ms but NOT to Dr!!!!!!!!!
ah well
Astounding.
Weird.
By the way, Wahine, I have never seen this before. What country(s) is this common in?
**head aches**
I’d be tempted, particularly since you’ve been nice and now are on first name basis, to say something more explicit. Just a “you might like to know for the workshop that if you feel you need to be formal at some point, both male and female PhDs are addressed as “Dr.”
Don’t people have better things to do with their time than pay attention to this kind of nonsense? If I wasted my life scrutinizing all the fine details of these sorts of aspects of professional life, I’d probably be a completely miserable person. My advice: get over it, and get over yourself.
Anon 1:24–while it easily seems true that all things equal the salutation thing might seem trivial–it isn’t at all, because the context of the abusive use of titles breaks the back of that dismissive ceteris paribus assumption on a regular basis. Certainly the original post above shows how salutation is used as a club by negation–and thus the intentional nullification of position and prestige–and I can certainly attest to that multiple times in my own experience in academia. One administrator on my campus recently publicly and unduly chided a friend of mine on email as Ms. X, peppering the rest of the email with contrastive references to Prof. Y and Dr. Z as laudatory–despite the fact that “Ms.” X has a PhD and Dr. Z actually did not! That was deliberate and helped, in some small part, to the eventual dismissal of that incompetent idiot. Titles do matter in this world–especially as they are deliberately and abusively misused.
Anonymous, I really don’t think the issue her is about personal slight – it is the worry that either explicit or implicit gender issues influenced the writer’s lack of title use. But, as we have discussed, we don’t know that for sure (see original post).
Address matters – not just because it indicates implicit bias, but perpetuates it. I just heard another great exammple on the radio. The ICC judges were described as: “a lady judge from Uganda, another lady judge from Ireland, and a judge from the pacific….” …….. WHAT!!!!! a male is not a male judge is but a judge, but a woman is a lady judge?
I am sure this speaker meant well, and probably deliberately wanted to tell the world there were women judges (and that that is a good thing – it was a positive comment). But would his word use not also emphasise the thought that a female judge is an exception/anomaly but a male judge is the norm?
I don’t blame this radiospeaker in the slightest – we all make these mistakes. but it just shows: address matters, and critically reflecting on the terms you use is important for uncovering your own biases so you can actively counter them.
JJ, thanks!!!! I am inclined to wait till the conference and see what the person is like — judged by his name he may well be German though he is certainly living and working in the UK academic environment.
Also, his persistence might indicate he never uses Dr — though surely it would either make sense to address a woman as Ms, or as Mrs/Miss, or Miss/Ms/Mrs — but Mrs/Ms makes very little sense to me? Besides, When not using Dr I like to use Miss — I am rather proud of being NOT married.
Aha! German! All becomes clear. According to German social mores he is being polite and, he probably thinks, respectful. One of the principal early battles of the German women’s movement was to eliminate the diminutive “Fraulein” (“-lein” and “-chen” being suffixes meaning “little”) as a form of address, leaving “Frau” as the single acceptable appellation for women of all ages, irrespective of marital status. This is translated in most dictionaries as “Mrs”. Anyone around while the feminist linguistic battles were (fairly successfully) being waged in Germany in the 1980s could, if they were well-meaning but weren’t paying – or willing to pay – very much attention, have absorbed the idea that this is how you address women no matter what, or no matter what other titles they may have.
Still leaves him not paying attention, though. A bit disappointing in someone who’s paid to think.
Wahine, I think your suggestion about different academic cultures could be right. Where I come from, you’d never address someone as Dr X , Prof X or Mr/Ms X. I actually think people would assume that you were either non-native speaker or sarcastic if you did. (You’d write ‘Dear [first name] [last name] to someone you don’t already know)
When I was a short term visitor in the US, I had to ask the person I was sharing the office with for advice every time I was to email someone (and in the beginning I was often surprised by his answers). Insiders tend to be blind to these kinds of cultural codes, but they can be very difficult to break for the outsider.
Maybe you could let the person know he has indirectly caused a lot of discussion on this blog.
Posting comments on an online blog is also paying attention to nonsense.
The replies to the original post were so interesting, and I’m grateful to the OPer for updating us all, thanks!
Were I you, I would happily say the next time he refers to my ‘title,’ “Hey, we’re on a first-name basis now, so please feel free to call me Professor!”