About six years ago, Amanda Moehring recalls a meeting where faculty had gathered to discuss student evaluations. To lead off, her male colleague overseeing the meeting began introductions around the table of mainly female participants, referring to each by their first name. When he reached the first male in the room, however, that colleague was introduced by his surname, preceded by the title "Dr." All of the females in the room had doctorates, so the inconsistency was striking. As the meeting proceeded, she began referring to each of the women in the room by "Dr." followed by their surname. In response, she remembers the male colleague chairing the meeting "stood there and sort of jerked back a little and looked flustered." She says he then sputtered, "Oh, I didn't mean, oh, oh I didn't realize I did that."
"He genuinely didn't realize what he was unconsciously doing," says Dr. Moehring.
What Dr. Moehring witnessed in that room - females of equivalent educational status to the males being referred to, even if inadvertently, as if they had a lower rank - has a name: unconscious demotion. It refers to assuming someone holds a position of lower status or expertise than they actually do. This, explains Malinda Smith, University of Calgary's associate vice-president of research (equity, diversity and inclusion), has been formally studied. It is just one of many types of unconscious or implicit biases that individually and cumulatively impact the composition of who attains faculty positions in academia, disadvantaging women, particularly racialized women, throughout all phases of their career, as outlined in her chapter "The Dirty Dozen," in the 2017 book The Equity Myth.
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