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Changing Clothes: Gender Inequality and Professional Socialization
- NWSA Journal
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2004
- pp. 138-155
- Article
- Additional Information
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.