An anecdote and an experiment
After the release of the Women Professors Monitor 2025 by the LNVH, I thought it would be interesting to share a personal anecdote and conduct a small experiment.
I don’t remember exactly when it was; I estimate sometime in 2022, when I had just become head of the Department of Microbiology. I was standing in my office with a stack of dissertations. The door was open. A nameplate was mounted next to the door. A middle-aged man appeared in the doorway. He looked at the nameplate and then at me.
“Could you give this to Prof. van Niftrik?” he asked.
It was an informational leaflet for an upcoming reunion at our faculty, for which our Department of Microbiology would be providing a tour. I had corresponded about this by email with - most likely - this man. The situation struck me as bizarre and a bit comical. To avoid embarrassing him, and perhaps also myself, I replied, “Of course, I’ll give it to Prof. van Niftrik.” After which the man left.
A bizarre situation, and one I later laughed about a lot with colleagues. Funny, but perhaps not that funny. It has since become an anecdotal story. A story that symbolises stereotypes, and how they shape what we see. I assume this person must have had a different image of what a professor or head of the Department of Microbiology looks like than the person he saw standing in the office.
I wondered whether that stereotypical image of a professor has changed. As a kind of n = 2 experiment, I asked my two children to draw a professor and then describe the drawing. Not exactly a representative sample with a mother who is a professor, I thought…
