Changing Clothes: Gender Inequality and Professional Socialization

To be successful in their chosen careers, professional students must internalize appropriate professional identities. In studying this process, I have found that students who are female and/or of color encounter greater difficulties because they frequently suffer from a problem I term identity dissonance. I engaged in intensive ethnographic and interview-based research at a law school and school of social work. In this paper, I describe how identity dissonance was evident in gendered and raced differences in wardrobe alterations among the professional students I observed.