Ask a Manager: Coworker wants us to call her 'doctor'

[minoanmiss]

I have a coworker who is very weird, and she recently completed an online doctorate in business administration from a for-profit University of Phoenix sort of situation. Since obtaining her degree, she insists that we refer to her as “Doctor” if anyone other than our immediate team is present. So, that’s what we’ve been doing, but it’s very hard not to let the eyes roll when her name comes up. Should we do anything about this? It’s like the Maestro situation in Seinfeld.

(And everyone else here is on a first-name basis with each other. Even the psychiatrist who works with us makes us call him by his first name!)

When you’re all on a first-name basis, that’s obnoxious and pretentious. Ideally her manager would explain to her that it’s out of sync with the office culture, maybe pointing out that you don’t use honorifics at all in your office.

I generally take a pretty hard-line stance on calling people what they want to be called when it’s a first name. This isn’t about her name, but rather her title. She didn’t want to be Ms. LastName before her doctorate. It’s about the honorific, and she’s trying to insist on an honorific in an office that doesn’t use them, and where everyone uses first names.

One caveat: I would potentially change my stance if she’s in a context where she feels marginalized and has to work extra hard to be taken seriously because of her sex or race. There’s a long history of people in that situation deliberately using honorifics to make a point / as a sort of shield.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I'm fairly confident that people outside the immediate group are marginalizing her, especially based on the reaction of the immediate group.

[green_grrl]

Yeah, I thought Alison nailed it. Abide by office norms unless she is not getting her due respect.

[shirou]

I've never seen people with non-medical doctorates called doctor outside of an academic setting. I have a PhD from a US News top ten university, and nobody calls me doctor.

[cereta]

Yeah. I mean, I barely use mine at work (community college; we don't stand too much on ceremony). I have once or twice gotten shirty about it, mostly because of gender issues, and I absolutely support, say, Jill Biden's choice to be "Dr. Biden," but this would make me bristle a little.

[shirou]

Yeah, we're on the same page—one has to use equivalent degrees of respect. If men get professional titles, so do women. If we're using senator and secretary as titles, doctor is fair game. But if everyone is on a first-name basis, insisting on the use of one's professional title is just pretentious.

[raine]

And usually unnecessary, which makes this letter feel weird. Like there's story we're not getting.

[minoanmiss]

Something about the LW rubbbed me the wrong way, not least the "weird" comment. I think this is a spun version of "Please introduce me as Dr Coworker when we're meeting clients, etc, and you're introducing everyone else/all the men by their doctorates", and her degree is from a perfectly fine place. But we're Supposed To Take Letter Writers At Their Word over on AAM...

[shirou]

... and her degree is from a perfectly fine place.

Well, maybe; maybe not. Criticisms of for-profit universities are not just snobbery. Most have poor graduation rates, use deceptive marketing tactics, engage in predatory lending, and rely almost entirely on underpaid part-time faculty. Many also have difficulty obtaining and maintaining accreditation, and credits earned in for-profit universities are rarely transferable to other institutions.

I'm not sure my reaction to the letter would be any different had the degree come from a traditional university, but I certainly would not characterize for-profit universities as "perfectly fine."

[minoanmiss]

You're right about for-profit schools, but the LW only implied the coworker's school was a for-profit place; they may have done so intentionally to convey their disdain for it ("the education there isn't any better than UoP") even though it's not actually a for-profit place. I don't think I trust the LW all that much.

[fred_mouse]

The strong exception to this is people who have just graduated (as this co-worker has) who are adjusting to the new them. I say this as someone who works with a lot of people with PhDs, have many friends with PhDs, and have worked with many PhD students. Of these, the only one I'm aware of who makes a thing of it past about the first year of graduation is a woman who is working in a different field from the one their doctorate is in, in an environment that has a history of discounting women (although as the old boys club is retiring, things are improving in leaps and bounds)

[mirlacca]

My oldest brother got a doctorate in mathematics, and started refusing mail which was not addressed to "Doctor" suchandso (considering he's legally changed his name three times, maybe the doctorate is the only stability his identification has). He even returned Christmas cards from his parents.

[minoanmiss]

Did he ever get treated for that unusually severe case of rectocranial inversion?

[mirlacca]

Don't know. The last time I spoke to him was 1986 or 7.

[minoanmiss]

That makes a lot of sense.

[minoanmiss]

cackles in agreement

[mirlacca]

My oldest brother got a doctorate in mathematics, and started refusing mail which was not addressed to "Doctor" suchandso (considering he's legally changed his name three times, maybe the doctorate is the only stability his identification has). He even returned Christmas cards from his parents.

(I also wonder if this woman realizes how insisting on being addressed as "Doctor" comes across to people who have doctorates from schools which are not "from a for-profit University of Phoenix sort of situation." (I spent my career at a national laboratory, and for a long time, in order to be a member of exempt staff, you had to have a Masters, minimum. So I acknowledge a strong streak of snobbery about this crap. However, we still addressed each other by first names, not titles!)