White Woman of a Certain Age

Do people get you mixed up with your colleagues?

Occasionally people refer to me by the wrong name and it’s momentarily disconcerting. At work I’m often part of a team of trainers working for a short period of time with a group of clients. We are quite likely not to meet them again – or for a long time - so no lasting harm is done if I’m temporarily referred to by the name of a colleague.

And getting a name wrong is quite easy to do. I always make notes at the start of a group session to make sure I address people correctly. I jot down something noticeable about their appearance or behaviour (coded lest it fall into the wrong hands). Last week my system was let down by my own handwriting. The lady in the spotty dress was Elaine and not Claire (miss the cross-bar on that capital E and you’re in big trouble!). She did not correct me on the day and I’m still feeling bad about it.

The colleague whose name I am most often given looks nothing like me – if we were stood next to one another there would be no confusion - but she is the same race, gender and age. Being white is not note-worthy in the field of business training and roleplay. Being female used to be – and I have certainly experienced dismissive sexism in my time - but over the last two decades this has improved in line with the progress of gender diversity in the client world. The final component of our common ground is age. I’m not overly concerned about getting older, so putting the two of us in a box generically marked ‘white women of a certain age’ is no great slight.

If it happened more often I do think I would start to baulk at the implication that the two of us are in every regard interchangeable.

A pair of my male colleagues regularly suffer a name-swap by clients, presumably on the basis of a shortage of hair on the head. They laugh about it but you can tell that to have this seem a defining characteristic is galling.

Recently though I was struck by how very little is at stake for me in my name being misapplied. During an online training event last month two of my colleagues were twice mistaken for one another. The visual differences between them are numerous, but in this team they had two areas of common ground that were peculiar to them: they were female and they were Asian. This naming error by a white client was probably a simple product of inattention (albeit unfortunate given that the event was in support of a diversity strategy) but what message was it giving to my colleagues?

When I am mis-named I always assume it to be the result of distractedness but I am nonetheless alert to any further signs of disrespect and, in years past would have been on the look-out for indications of misogyny. I have never had to wonder if my value as an individual was being cancelled out by racial prejudice and for that I am extremely grateful.