The most recent CHE First Person has set off a new round of blogging about the perennial topic of professorial attire. New Kid and Blogenspiel, among others, have already set Mr. Pannapacker/Benton straight on how his year-long experiment with “dressing formally” has very little relevance to female academics who are held to two conflicting standards: look authoritative but be pretty.

I have plenty to say about this topic, especially since I am still foaming at the mouth about the financial injustices of academia. There’s a conclusion to be drawn from this cluster of facts:

Academics are underpaid.
Female academics are paid less than male.
Female academics are expected to dress professionally.
Female professional dress costs more than male.

And so the circle of life exploitation continues …

I’d also like to share a little story from my day that highlights some of the absurd lengths professional women have to go to dress appropriately:

I generally rate pantyhose alongside high heel shoes and hair dye as part of a trifecta of fashion torture designed especially to keep women miserable. But, in order to appear professional in my university environment, skirts are necessary and it’s been too cold for bare legs so: tights to the rescue. Today I went shopping for tights — nothing else, just a short excursion to the store and home again. Still suffering mightily from the flu, sniffling and coughing, I nonetheless recognized that I have important meetings all week and I would need some damn tights.

I went to three stores: Target, JC Penneys, and Kohls. You’d think you could walk into any one of these joints and find a whole rack of stockings in a variety of colors and sizes. You would be wrong. In my Urban Sprawl Community, each of these stores looked like they had been ransacked by crazed hoards of panty-hose wearing consumers. The kind who open up every pack of hose and then toss them on the ground. Who apparently all wear my size and eschew spangled, silver-striped hose in favor of the sober black and brown I was trying to locate. If, on your errands today, you saw a harried woman crouched in the aisle of your local big box store, rooting through a pile of discarded panty hose — that glorious creature was me.

This outing took the better part of 2 hours. Two hours out of my precious Sunday afternoon when I needed to be prepping my classes, cleaning my house, or at the very least clutching a hot mug of tea as I snoozed on the couch (flu, remember). I came home this afternoon cursing the fact that I’m have to deal with stupid shit like this, that I have to sacrifice time and money and general peace of mind over a pair of tights. Oh yeah, I blame the patriarchy for my troubles.

And guess what, I still don’t have those fucking tights.