A Blonde Professor in California

Dear all,

While at Stanford, I wrote a blog called WZZN for the student community. WZZN is short for "Wat Zegt Ze Nou," a Dutch expression that can be freely translated to "What the heck is she on about?". I used it to provide more or less helpful advice or just thoughts about grad school, from admissions to Ph.D. completion, and sometimes on entirely irrelevant topics like Dutch cheese (I'm very opinionated about that!). Now that I'm full-time at WiDS Worldwide , I decided to continue the blog tradition with a different name. So here's WiDSDOM. It will come out every Wednesday. Topics will vary from WiDS to careers, from math to the weather, from things I know about to things I think I know about. And you can help decide topics: ask a question and I will write about it.

I asked some friends to give me a first topic to get me started. And they came up with "What are some of the strange things people have said to you as a woman in tech?". So here is a small story about a blonde and a high table.

I used to be a natural blond. It's not entirely uncommon in the Netherlands, where I grew up. Over the years, my hair darkened, but this wonderful invention called hair highlighting helped me keep up the pretense. When I emigrated to the US, I realized that being blonde wasn't necessarily associated with being sharp. Oh well. I was by then hooked on blonde and too stubborn to change.

One year, I was invited to speak at a university in the UK. After the talk, I was invited to dinner and seated at a table of professors. An elderly gentleman across the table started the conversation:

- "Who are you with tonight?"

- "Just with myself, thank you."

- "Where do you have your faculty position?"

- "At a small university in California called Stanford."

He went on, and quite seriously at that, with

- "My, Stanford... I did not realize that blonde women could become professors there?"

Thinking he was tongue-in-cheek in typical deadpan British humor, I laughed, but as it turned out, he was just surprised that I could be a blonde and a professor in computational sciences all at the same time. To help him out, I then said

- "Not to worry, it's fake blonde"

and all thankfully seemed right again in his world.

There are many stories I can tell, from the very serious (harassment, aggression, sexism) to the relatively harmless and the entertaining. This falls in the latter category for me. I wish him well.

By the way, the idea of the dumb blonde is mainly directed at females. Wikipedia has an interesting article about the blonde stereotype: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blonde_stereotype. I'm with Dolly Parton. She wrote a song on it, "Dumb Blonde," with the lyrics, "just because I'm blonde, don't think I'm dumb 'cause this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool." And according to this Wikipedia article, she was not offended by "all the dumb-blonde jokes?because I know I'm not dumb. I'm also not blonde."

Till next week. Ask me any questions,

Cheers, Margot