You sound like a great neighbor and community member. But my comment was regarding the original issue: a white male criticizing Jill Biden for referring to herself as Dr. As if that is somehow “cheating” because she’s not a medical doctor. Your comment that it probably wasn’t a great idea to use Dr. for an Ed.D. sounded like someone who has never experienced credibility issues in the workplace. I was focusing on professional life, not interactions with your neighbors. It is not uncommon for a professional woman to be asked or implicitly expected to make coffee, take notes in meetings, and similar “support duties”, while men are not.

My lived experience is that white men don’t need to establish their credibility by citing their academic credentials. Women typically do; if they don’t explicitly reference their PhD or other doctoral degree, they are unconsciously assumed to not be as credible in a variety of workplaces and professional settings.

I am sure that Jill Biden doesn’t refer to herself, or asked to be referred to, as Dr Biden in social settings and neither do I. But both of us have every right to use Dr. in front of our names, because a doctoral degree involves having done original research and writing a thesis — in other words, adding new knowledge to the world. The word doctor is Latin for teacher.

So which other doctoral degrees don’t you think merit using “Dr.”? Is it just education? Or maybe if the degree is from a state university and not the Ivy League?