A gown that shows more cleavage than credentials gains critics.
A low-cut, crotch-length graduation gown with a mortarboard marketed as 'Delicious Women's PhD Darling Costume' has been garnering ire and jokes since being offered on Amazon this Halloween. Almost two-thirds of around 350 reviewers give it the lowest possible rank. Carol Colatrella, who co-directs the Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, says that the gown sexualizes women. “This is a subtle way of digging at them and saying 'you're just a woman' or 'you're a sexual object',” she says. Such outfits are not limited to costume suppliers; in 2012, a European Commission campaign to attract more girls to science was criticized in part for featuring similarly short skirts.
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Stereotyping: PhD costume slammed. Nature 515, 455 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7527-455d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7527-455d