Thread by @OmanReagan, Since people are discussing the use of Dr. as a title for [...]

Since people are discussing the use of Dr. as a title for a woman with a PhD, I want to share a quick story from 2016 about how well-meaning compliance with seemingly innocent rules and norms helps keep us in this confused and sexist place re: "Dr."

In 2016 I wrote an article for an online publication about sexism and gender discrimination. Because some women with PhDs are often not taken seriously as experts the way some men are, I decided to use the title Dr. for all the PhDs in the article. They were all women.

The editor I worked with replied to the piece and said "I wanted to let you know that I removed the Dr. before most of the names in the text of your piece aside from [one of them], since she is a physician."

Oh look, here's that exact thing we're talking about today. But why?

The editor explained the reason she removed Dr. from all the women in the article: "you’ll see that we don’t use Dr. before researchers’ names, as per AP style ... We follow the same style as Nature and Science on this."

So AP style has itself contributed to this problem.

I replied to the editor and explained why I specifically chose to use the "Dr." title in this article: "One of the issues with Dr. is that most of the women I mention in the article have PhDs but are often not taken seriously as experts."

A few more quotes from my email...

"They have experiences every day that reproduce this - like working at their universities and being confused for cleaning staff or secretaries.

Since the PhD is the highest credential awarded after an extraordinary amount of work, the Dr. title indicates that experience."

"The use of Dr. then is meant to work against this tendency to not take women with PhDs seriously. I regularly hear from women PhDs that the most important thing for them is to be referred to with the proper title, which is Dr."

"In this article, I made sure to use Dr. to refer to each of these women specifically because the very issue at hand is exactly this kind of experience that women have"

I concluded my reply by saying: "I think it’s very important to retain the use of Dr. in this article."

The next email I got was from the Editor-in-Chief.

He said "While we’re sympathetic to your argument, and to your preference, we are following the AP stylebook, in which 'Dr.' is only used for those with certain medical degrees."

The EIC suggested that if I believed it was "necessary" we might be able to use it for some of them, but asked me "to reflect on balancing your intellectual/moral goals for fairness and respect (which are very admirable) with your writing goals of clarity and accessibility."

The Editor-in-Chief said the main concern with using "Dr." was that people would literally stop reading because using "Dr." would "make the reading experience too clunky."

I didn't think this was true, or a good reason, so I continued to argue my case. Because I'm like that.

I said my preference was to to keep the Dr. titles. I told them that I understood this wouldn't be following the AP stylebook rule, but pointed out that the AP stylebook was ALSO the reason journalists continued to write “manned” instead of “crewed” when talking about spaceships.

I replied to the editors saying: "To me, the choice between not recognizing their expertise and credentials and making the readers slog through 'who has a doctorate in X' multiple times seems like a false choice."

And I said: "It places us in the position of choosing between erasing the challenges overcome by these scholars who are already marginalized because they are women - or making the content of the post, which is about the very issue of their marginalization, difficult to read."

This exchange with the Editor-in-Chief went back and forth for several more emails, each of which was turning into an essay of its own, before they finally relented and agreed to let me use Dr. for all of the PhDs in the article.

Why did they relent? I was being very annoying.

Sometimes, you have to be insistent, not back down, and just refuse to follow norms and rules that you disagree with. Even if it makes you very annoying to deal with. Sometimes you just have to be politely difficult to change things.

This was not the only issue in editing the article. We had debates about "female" vs "women" and about citing basic facts on harassment. Even with a very receptive editorial staff, it was a huge challenge to convince them to let me write the right way about sexism and expertise.

I appreciate that they eventually relented, but still find the premise of their approach troubling. It's the idea that audiences aren't smart enough to figure this out. But they are! And as writers and publications, it's our job to teach them that YES peple with PhDs are "Dr."

And make no mistake, when people say a woman with a PhD shouldn't be called "Dr." it's sexism. It's the same kind of discrimination women, and especially POC, have faced inside and outside academia for generations. But as writers we have the power to change it, here and now.

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