Candis Ungerleider rushes through the halls of the University of Michigan Hospital, dashes into her office, grabs her white doctor’s coat and name tag and throws them on as she races to her patient, hoping to get even just a few minutes to bond with the person waiting for her on a gurney. When a patient is about to get emergency heart surgery, they typically like to know who is going to be making their life-or-death decisions. Ungerleider acknowledges there is something about that traditional white coat that signals competency to a patient.
Ungerleider, like many women in male-dominated workspaces, finds that she often has to choose between presenting feminine beauty and being treated as competent and successful in a primarily male career. She is no stranger to male-dominated spaces. Throughout her nine-year career, she has worked in one of the most male-dominated fields of medicine: emergent aortic heart surgery. Ungerleider has found that fitting in with the male majority instead of standing out is more valuable in gaining respect from colleagues and patients. For example, in an operating room, Ungerleider tends to wear muted scrubs which represent a more professional and traditionally surgical look, similar to the white coat.
“I’ve made those decisions consciously and subconsciously because I think that it confers confidence,” Ungerleider said.
Around Year Four of her nine years of training at the University of Michigan hospital, Ungerleider started to notice that her male colleagues tended to have more confidence in grabbing the opportunities offered, especially in surgery rooms.
“I’m noticing how I behave in the operating room versus my male colleagues, and realizing I’m missing out on opportunities,” Ungerleider reflects on the beginning of her earlier career. “When the teacher asked if they had done a certain surgery before, their answer was always ‘yes’ even if they hadn’t. The women were more likely to tell the truth, and therefore got less of a chance of getting instruction and operating room time.”
She realized that she was going to have to make the conscious decision to appear more like her male counterparts, both in how she acted and how she looked. In addition to the white coat, Ungerleider signals competence by not wearing much makeup, as it is a very feminine mode.
“I make an active choice to not appear too girly. People don’t trust the cute girl. So they want somebody who they see as being competent. And I think in surgery, people understand competency from a male aesthetic, a male voice, a male presentation, and that has to do with all the history behind surgery being very male-dominated,” Ungerleider said.
Although she does wear makeup occasionally, not wearing makeup isn’t just about conforming to masculine expectations. There are also practical reasons why Ungerleider rarely wears makeup at work. For one, she has a limited amount of time in her day before work, and prefers to spend it with her husband. And also, some makeup, like mascara, actually gets in the way when she works, brushing against the surgical loupe glasses that the surgeons use to magnify what they are working on.
Ungerleider isn’t the only one who feels pressure to fit into male-dominated fields. Adelaide Barcalow, a new math teacher at Community, talks about her time in engineering school. Her few female engineering co-workers most commonly wore pantsuits to work compared to more feminine options like blouses or skirts.
“It’s like femininity is seen as not serious and not capable,” Barcalow said. “Being a man in that professional setting is the default, so it’s almost like the goal is to not stand out as to be taken seriously as a professional.”
A study by the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media backs up what Barcalow remembers. The study shows that men perceive that there are more women in a room than there actually are. In the study, men thought that there were about 50% women and 50% men in a room that actually only had 17% women. By the time women filled about 33% of a room, the men were sure it was a clear majority of women. Many men are used to only having men around because that is what is normal in many workplaces. When a woman shows up, it feels really unusual to a man and they perceive the ratio of women to be higher. The study backs up why women feel they need to blend in in workspaces to gain the respect they deserve because, no matter what, they tend to stand out when surrounded by men. It is no wonder that Ungerleider and Barcalow both feel that women are affected disproportionately by beauty standards in comparison to men.
Traditionally, a woman’s job often was domestic work; being a presentable housewife was a big part of the image as well. Now that women are playing big roles in the workforce, they are starting to distance themselves from that image. Often in jobs traditionally held by men, women generally dress as if they were taking on the role of the male figure who was historically in that position.
Most people, for example, although perhaps unconsciously, are more willing to trust an older, white, male surgeon because that’s traditional and that’s what the media portrays a stereotypical surgeon to be. So people like Ungerleider have to match the old-fashioned stereotype to have many of their patients see them for the successful surgeon that they are.
But, while biases and social norms are deeply ingrained in people’s minds in our culture and society, they’re not permanent. In just the past half a century, women have found their way into high places of power that they’ve never been in before, even reaching the vice presidency of the United States. So it begs the question: how long will it take for people to see through their bias and tradition? How long will it take before women are considered as competent and successful as men while being free to express their identity however they choose?
