Ask Me Anything: To Ph.D or Not to Ph.D?

...Should we highlight our doctoral degrees outside of higher ed?

Hi, Readers!

It’s time for another Ask Me Anything, where I answer your anonymous questions about anything related to DEI, Leaving Academia, and/or Contemporary Workplace Culture. I was thrilled when this question came in, as I had already considered creating a post about this topic! It has to do not with whether to get a Ph.D (though perhaps that is also a worthy topic, down the road) but rather when, how, and ultimately whether to include the degree as part of your work identity. Here it is:

I'd love to hear more about how to decide to keep PhD in your work title, signature, business card, etc. after leaving academia (and being in a role that doesn't require a PhD)? Do you do it? How did you decide? How do others decide?

This is a great question, as it taps into so many related questions that Ph.D.s navigate outside of academia: Does anyone care about our degree? Does it help to establish our credibility? Or can it undermine it? Do we come off as entitled snobs? Might it intimidate others? Or might folks sincerely appreciate knowing that we earned this degree on the way to our current positions?

I’ll cut to the chase on my own personal choice, in my current role: While I don’t have business cards, I do include my degree in my email signature, which currently reads as follows:

I made the choice to add “Ph.D.” after my name for a few reasons: First, I work in a research role where my degree and prior experience seems directly relevant. I was hired to do ethnographic and other qualitative research, and my doctoral training and 15 years of academic research, coupled with a few years of additional industry experience, are part of what I believe earned me my position. And while I work with a number of very competent folks who have trained up in other ways, terminal degrees are not uncommon on our team —I work with a lot of fellow Ph.D.s. A Ph.D. is pretty unremarkable in our team, so I don’t stand out by flagging mine. Our degrees also help to establish our credibility in some cases, especially given our function as an in-house research and consulting engine for the organization. (While our business partners sometimes use outside vendors or consultants, our work is generally well-respected, and they often do so in partnership with us or our leadership.) Finally, as I was creating my own email signature, I asked a colleague (who also has a Ph.D.) if I could copy his and he had no problem with that; I simply swapped his info for my own, and a few others on my team have since done the same. And so this template has also become something of a norm.

That said, I did not include it in my last role:

While it was a Director-level role (not apparent from the title), and my research and subject matter expertise had earned me a place on the DEI team, our work was primarily consultative and involved program/project design and management. (Think like an in-house Deloitte or McKinsey.) Using data to understand gaps and measure impact was vital to our work, but we partnered with other branches of the organization to provide those metrics —branches like the function where I now serve at my current company. The company was also based in California, which combined with working with a large number of creatives in the entertainment industry, made signaling a Ph.D. feel stuffy inside that organization’s culture. While we had Ph.D.s and J.D.s on our team, I don’t recall anyone else in my department using it in their signatures. I had no qualms about leaving mine off —though it was sometimes a bit awkward if folks found out later that I had a Ph.D. and had written three books! They’d ask if they should have been calling me doctor (no!!) and seemed to fear they hadn’t treated me with enough reverence —something I’d never have wanted. In all cases, I didn’t want or need the extra status that a Ph.D. can confer, and it simply wasn’t a norm.

Digging up my two industry email signatures prompted me to look up my last signature from higher ed, just as a refresher on how I thought about it inside academia:

This was after my 6-year term as department chair, which had also previously been part of the signature: so “Chair, Department of…” also led off that second line for six years. This was also before I had come to regularly use bookshop.org as a more ethnical alternative to Amazon for book shopping. Here, I was flagging not only my expertise as an author and scholar (something I did very deliberately as a young woman —I started on the tenure track at 29) but also my earned credentials: as a Full Professor and of course with my Ph.D. I also had taken to using my middle initial early in my academic career, and so kept it visible consistently through much of that time. (I guess I just wanted another letter in my name or something? It seems silly now, but I trust the much younger version of myself who felt that this spiffed her up a little; I’m glad she can rest easier now.)

What to make of all this? There’s no right or wrong answer; so much of it, as the question-asker rightly flags, is context-specific. That context depends in part on the role, but also the norms and what the title may convey to others, which could be a thousand different things! The good news is that with paper business cards (in my experience) being exceptionally rare these days (and instead LinkedIn QR codes or profile names taking their place), you can easily edit if you want to adjust.

Other Ph.D.s in industry, how did YOU decide? Tell us in the comments.