Is That Legal?

I was going to say "Heck no!" but I realized that I did, in a sense, once worry about that very thing.

Back in the early 90s it was still SOP for east coast engineers to wear suits and ties and as a travelling support engineer for a company, I was expected to do so, even when merely flying someplace on their behalf.

When they sent me to Intel in California for several months I showed up in the required suit and tie. The next day I was wearing what I saw everyone else wearing - open collar shirt and jeans.

In 3 months I had grown a pony tail.

This wasn't because I had found freedom or something like that - it was because the Intel engineers loathed anyone who wore a suit and if I wanted them to take my engineering knowledge seriously, I had to look like what they thought an engineer should look like.

So, there you go.

It's certainly my impression that women feel like they have to maintain a more consistent image in professional settings, and that feeling is pretty well borne out by sociological and professional data....

Thanks for bringing up this topic, Eric, and for cross-referencing my post on Concurring Opinions. Through 3 years of law school (Yale, '94) I had but one female professor. I wanted so much for her to be someone I could model myself after, but for various reasons she simply was not. I knew then that I looked at her differently and wanted something from her that didn't matter with my male professors. She was such a rare bird in that male dominated institution. I also knew that if I were at the front of a classroom, I had a responsibility to the women in my class that I had to take seriously, a responsibility to look extremely professional and together, as well as to be at the top of my game intellectually. That is the persona I try to cultivate. I believe it has always been a gendered agenda.

Do I consciously try to create a "professional persona?" Absolutely. In the corporate world, your reputation often preceeds you and how you are perceived can open (or close) many doors. Depending on how you are perceived, many advocacy efforts can be successful (or unsuccessful) before even starting the discussion. A reputation of being "open minded" or a "collaborator" will have people willing to compromise; a reputation of being "rigid" or "inflexible" will almost immediately lead to confrontation. Once initial impressions are made, they are often difficult to change.

Moreover, rightly or wrongly, for women, there is the added difficulty of the very fine line between being perceived as aggressive or tough and being perceived as a bitch.

My 3L year at Carolina, I went to a lunch talk with three female professors about women working in law. These are really amazing, strong, funny women--role models. And as they spoke about balancing work and family life, it became clear that they had been unable to get their husbands to do half the work at home. It didn't affect my opinion of them, and I'm glad they spoke to us freely about themselves. If they had been trying to create a persona of some sort, I'm not sure we would've gotten such straight information. But I did think that if these women could not manage it, how could I? I found it pretty depressing, but I'm glad they were frank with us.

Oh, c'mon, Eric, you've always had a professsional persona, even back in 1987 in the firm world, and I'll bet it's shifted a bit between there, the federal government, Wyoming, and then North Carolina. I know mine has between New York firm life (where, among other things, I appeared a laid-back midwesterner)and academia in Cleveland (where to some I appear to some as a big firm NYC litigating asshole). In other words, persona is as much or more about who's perceiving it as it is about what you're projecting.

[But Peter, I'm talking about something slightly different. Of course we are all seen by others in certain ways. But the professor whose words I linked to was referring to a persona that she herself works to create. That strikes me as something rather different. Were you consciously trying to look like a laid-back midwesterner at ARKO?--ELM

Then again, after seeing this (http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/powerpose/index.html)(hat tip to Bitch Ph.D.) it's pretty clear why women would be more conscious of their personas.

When I first practicing big firm law around 1990, I noticed that male partners always have pictures of their children or grandchildren in their offices, and women almost never did. I think that women were concerned that they would appear less professional if people thought of them as mothers. Ironically, the absence of family pictures made the women less like their more numerous male counterparts than if they had the pictures.

Today, family pictures seem to be more common for women.

Everyone has multiple personas. Its just a matter of how consious you are of when you switch between them. I would say the more public the forum the more important it can be to consiously choose and foster a persona (professional or otherwise)

I'm a software developer and I'm looking into starting a blog so I've been thinking a lot about personas lately. I have many different interests which I wouldn't mind blogging about, but I realize that any future employer is highly likely to google for me and find any website/blog/etc I may have. Therefor the persona that is in my best interest to present online is the "professional software developer".

Knowing this limits the choice of topics that I should blog about. ie. ranting about politics/law/military could potentially hurt me professionally.

So I can understand her position on being consious about her persona in public. What seems more interesting to me is her view that being married is somehow inconsistant with being "an independant, fearless, freedom fighting law professor". There would seem to be some gender/feminism issue there.

I think most people do. It may be a question of awarness. Generally speaking we all have an idea of what professional demeanor is and make an effort to exhibit it. Women are made aware early on that there is a distinction between being a professional and presenting a professional demeanor. These are things you already know, she just made you think about it.

ELM: Just to be clear, I understand that we all try to act "professional." I'm asking about efforts to create a particular impression within the domain of "professional"--you know, the impression of being "deeply intellectual," or "impeccably fair," or "brazen and fearless," or what have you. The law professor to whom I referred worried that getting married would conflict with a specific image that she has of being independent and "fearless." It's that sort of persona-creation that I'm wondering about.

When you are married you assume the risk of being addressed by another person's name and being treated as subordinate to another person on tax and financial and utility correspondence and by salesmen. These are petty indignities but they add up. Even in the present day, marriage in some respects makes you an appendage of another person who is presumed whole and complete while you are presumed auxiliary and incomplete. If of childbearing age you are also presumed likely to give up your skilled work to take up unpaid employment as a servant to your own children. "You" being the woman of course.

I'm still recovering from beginning to think about the way tax forms address one member of the household as "you" and the other as "your spouse." Yes, some households probably name the woman as "you" and the man as "your spouse," but they are probably in a small minority and of course reversing the positions still slights someone. A presumption of equal status among a household's adult members seems to be beyond possibility for us still.