Women face sexism in every industry but recent Twitter campaigns have drawn attention to the particular problems that exist within academia.
The #MeTooPhD and #MeTooSTEM hashtags have both been used to detail experiences of harassment and sexist behaviour on campus, while women have also described how they are frequently mistaken for their husband because they have the ‘Dr’ prefix in their name.
In fact the problem is so bad that postdoctoral researcher, Dr Jess Wade, at Imperial College London has pledged to add a new Wikipedia entry every day for a female scientist to given women the visibility they deserve in the field.
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Now Hannah McCann, 33, a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia has raised another issue facing women in academia – dress codes.
McCann mockingly created a tweet thread telling young women what to wear if they want to “get ahead” in the industry. She said if they followed her instructions it was “respectability guaranteed”.
She suggests several outfits for your next meeting, including a banana hat.
McCann told HuffPost UK: “I wrote the thread in a fit of annoyance after seeing one too many tweets about what women in academia should and shouldn’t wear. It’s something academic women think about a lot, because the profession is very gendered – the ‘intellectual’ is coded as male.”
Or a dress made out of bin bags because when you’re starting out in academia every penny counts.
Other suggestions including demon horse, bride, suit of armour – or our favourite one of all: dressing as an old, white man.
We have no choice but to stan.