A female friend and colleague of mine, a professor of chemistry at my university, recounted to me an incident in which she and a few other professors were being introduced by their department chair to a visiting speaker. The chair went around the group saying, “This is professor X”, “This is professor Y” and so on until it came to her and then he said “This is Z”, giving just her first name. Z is not someone who stands on ceremony. She is friendly in her demeanor, dresses casually, and is not offended when her students call her by her first name, like many other male and female professors. And yet, this incident rankled her because she was the only one being addressed this way. She felt belittled by comparison, less respected. She says that as a woman is science, she is often the only one in a group of her peers, and this kind of thing has happened more than once.
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