This Essay examines professionalism as a tool to subjugate people of color in the legal field. Professionalism is a standard with a set of beliefs about how one should operate in the workplace. While professionalism seemingly applies to everyone, it is used to widely police and regulate people of color in various ways including hair, tone, and food scents. Thus, it is not merely that there is a double standard in how professionalism applies: It is that the standard itself is based on a set of beliefs grounded in racial subordination and white supremacy. Through this analysis, professionalism is revealed to be a racial construct.

A blueprint for increasing Black faculty satisfaction in higher education.

A qualified study of Black cisgender women's faculty experiences using an interactionist framework. Participants engaged in a variety of impression management techniques to overcome implicit biases and controlling images that shaped their students' and the colleagues' perceptions.

As the population in the United States workforce changes, both in generations and ethnicity, professionalism must evolve to become more accepting of cultures, abilities, and backgrounds.

In this qualitative meta-narrative, I explore how Black women administrators in higher education experience and navigate policing in predominantly white work environments. Using intersectionality as a framework and semi-structured interviews as the primary data collection technique, the findings from this study reveal workplace policing manifests for Black women on physical, emotion, and communicative levels. More specifically, participants endured restrictions and navigated dissatisfaction with their tone of voice, criticism of their attire and style of dress, and (mis)perceptions of office fit. Participants also reported engaging in self-policing practices to (over)compensate for and in anticipation of workplace-based policing struggles. I include implications for research and practice.

Professionalism as a concept requires staff and students to behave with integrity during the university experience (Van der Sluis, Burden & Huet, 2017). This theme directly tackles what antiracist professionalism could be and look like for a university. ‘Professionalism’ is a code (Sethy, 2018). This is true both in its role as a code of conduct, written and unwritten rules for behaviour within a workplace, and as a system of meaning that is designed to include a select group of people while maintaining the illusion of inclusion for all. It is no coincidence, for example, that the concept is associated with roles and industries that have often been gatekept from working-class communities.

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We explore how heteronormative and cisnormative expectations of post-secondary professors impact professional practices and increase the regulation and surveillance of queer professors in academia.

The purpose of this paper is to build upon the paucity of UK research on gay men and how they manage their identities, bodies and selves in the workplace. Particular focus is placed on gay male professionals working in positions of authority and how they make sense of themselves against the dominant expectations of professionalism.

In this chapter, I draw attention to the role educational administrators and community members may have in creating queer exclusion through discourses of professionalism. Because of this exclusion, it may be helpful to deconstruct some of the particular assumptions and values associated with professionalism that interact with and silence social difference. The problem is that professionalism, vis-à-vis having a “professional” identity, engaging in “professional” behaviours, and operating on the basis of “professional” values, is often ill-defined in educational institutions and this creates the potential for marginalization.

The norms of professionalization, viewed through a queer lens, are seen as a means to regulate affect and to banish queer forms of pleasure—much to the detriment of the academic profession. A queer, medievalist approach may help us with the project of building happier doctoral student selves. By looking at the indeterminancies and contradictions within medieval theories about “professions,” and by examining the queer valences of the first recorded use of the word professionalism (1856), we might open up spaces within our doctoral programs for productively “unprofessional” behavior.

The purpose of this study was to examine how lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and/or questioning women manage their appearance during and after the interview process. I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 22 self-identifying LGBTQ+ women who worked in an environment with business casual or business dress code expectations and were between the ages of 23 and 39. Based upon analysis of the data, four key themes emerged. These themes included appearance labour, appearance malleability, appearance inflexibility and job search motivations. Participants related that they were actively thinking about and reflecting on their appearance in relation to their sexual identity and how this might impact hiring outcomes. Implications for how employers can potentially reduce bias during the hiring practice are offered.

Promoting the inclusion of trans and non-binary (TNB) medical trainees is a key step in building an inclusive health workforce well-positioned to provide high-quality healthcare to all patients. Existing data on the experiences of TNB physicians and trainees describe widespread challenges related to prejudice and discrimination, with most trainees concealing their gender identity for fear of discrimination. We aimed to understand how TNB medical students have experienced professionalism and professional identity formation.