Interview with Professor Meredith Banasiack

The last piece of research that I did for my paper was conducting an interview. I chose to interview one of my professors because like me, she is blonde but does not fit into the dumb blonde stereotype. She is a successful architect, professor, and researcher and I was interested to see how stereotyping affected her experience in any or all of these fields. Surprisingly, her answers aligned exactly with the views expressed in my paper and the interview was extremely valuable to finishing up my draft. One thing that I was interested to learn was that she believes that she is stereotyped every day. This is shocking to me because it seems that after establishing yourself in the beginning of any position people would stop judging you simply off of your looks. One of my favorite answers of hers was her response to blondes in the media. She recognized that there is a difference between being misperceived and intentionally aligning yourself with a particular stereotype for self-promotion. This distinction is what I had already written in my conclusion so I was excited to see that she agreed with me and had the same views on blonde stereotypes. She also recognized that today's cultural stereotypes associate blondes with sex and beauty which is exactly what I proved in my paper. For this reason, she feels that blondes in sales positions have an advantage because they can be more successful if people are attracted to them. However, she believes that in job positions which require a greater level of intelligence, it is disadvantageous to be blonde. As a teacher, she admitted that she does feel stereotyped and that people underestimate her abilities because she is a blonde female. She teaches Social Factors in Design which is largely based on psychology so she loves challenging this common misperception that students have of her. I feel the same way when it comes to being stereotyped based off of hair color because I love seeing how people react when they realize I am much more intelligent than I look.