In the last 36 hours or so, lots of women I know who use Twitter (and lots of women I only know through Twitter) have added ‘Dr’ to their twitter handle (their Twitter ID) to make it clear that they have a PhD in some subject; thus, that they are experts. If you’re not on Twitter, there’s a summary so far here and it has just made it to The Independent; meanwhile the hashtag spawned by the discussion, #immodestwomen, is trending. The initial kerfuffle which started this was a fairly typical Twitter incident in which a woman who has published on her subject encountered a man who doesn’t appear to have a PhD in the subject he writes about.
Coming a week after the launch of a database for the #womenalsoknowhistory movement, and continued fury at manels (all-male panels at conferences etc), for which there’s an earlier summary here, the enthusiasm for including Dr comes across as the latest expression of a wider frustration among academic women that they are not always taken seriously. It relates to discussions elsewhere about whether one should only use Dr if the expert is a medic of some sort and, like many PhDs, I can certainly bear witness to the potential for confusion on that Dr/Dr front; in a medical episode some years back I discovered that if you give your title as Dr in a hospital context they’ll assume you’re medical and speak to you in medicspeak. That may, or may not, be what you want!
But the main issue here is that of gender. I don’t like to see other women attacked, but on this occasion I’m not showing solidarity by adding in Dr to my own handle. Why not? Well, anyone on Twitter can add in Dr or Professor or Dame or Mother of Dragons and that’s fine, although for ‘Mother of Dragons’ Daenerys didn’t have to research and produce a scholarly piece of work that advanced her field – although she did have to eat that heart to become Khaleesi… I think I’d rather write a PhD thesis. If you are entitled to your title (!): well done! If you’ve just gained your doctorate, congratulations, and I can see why you want to tell the world by changing your handle.
For me, however, as a retiring academic, it’s all such a long time ago (PhD 1985 – the distant past) and there have been so many other battles since. Part of my reluctance to join in this Dr movement is simply because those four+ years of hard work (funded, so full-time, and I remain grateful for that) no longer seem to define me. There’s also the point that I think of my identity as more than being an academic with a doctorate. A further aspect is that I no longer use Dr very much. Since I’ve been a professor, that’s what I use in academic contexts, although more and more I just use my name and leave people who want to know more to look up my home page. But I’ve never had the urge to use Prof on Twitter, not least because I wouldn’t regard myself as an expert in everything on which I tweet!
Most importantly though, I feel that the interest in whether or not someone has a PhD in the subject is obscuring something else. Taking history as the central discipline here, as that’s where all this began, is a given piece of work good history, or not? Not every book written by someone with a PhD is wonderful and not everything written by those without PhDs is bad. There are some great books out there written by people without a PhD in the subject who’ve done their research well, and often – to take an example from my field of the history of medicine – have taken the time to study a demanding course like the Society of Apothecaries Diploma. An excellent example here would be Wendy Moore, who did just that. My own PhD doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to disagree with me, although I’d be grateful if you disagree without suggesting I’m stupid or that I haven’t read the books to which I refer (having a PhD and being a professor certainly doesn’t mean everyone agrees on the quality of my work and it doesn’t mean they are polite about it). I’m allowed to change my own mind, too, as I go on reading and thinking and writing and talking to people.
So perhaps it’s my own history that means I don’t believe people are going to start being really respectful to someone just because they announce that they have a PhD. People can still play games like challenging the value of that PhD as less meaningful than one from University X, or in a less important sub-discipline than theirs, or challenge you because of who your supervisor or external examiners were, or because you took a long time to publish your PhD, or criticise you because you’re not published in the right journals or…. You get the picture.
If you’ve got it, by all means flaunt it, but don’t expect your life as a woman with a PhD to become any easier. It will take more than changing some twitter handles to achieve that. We still live in a sexist society and all of us, women and men, need to go on challenging the assumptions of the academic world.
The retiring academic 