Dear Sir

This is how most of the letters are addressed to me. These letters are usually from students who want to do a 6 month dissertation project, needed to fulfill their curriculum. In reality, the colleges and universities that have mushroomed around in India do not have proper laboratory facilities and do not want to do practicals with the students. So they palm them off to Institutes and Universities like ours to teach them the experimental aspect of Biosciences. I do not mind having them around as they are often times brighter than our Ph.D. students. But I do object to receiving letters addressed to me as Dear Sir. It is as though the students cannot ever imagine that a woman can be a scientist. What is worse is many of these letters are from women students themselves. This bothers me a tad bit. Do these girls really believe that all scientists are men only? Or they know that there can be women scientists but cannot be bothered to address the letter properly? Or is it something that they have been taught in their letter-writing exercises in school- address letters as Dear Sir, you know?
It is however, not restricted to the students. Today The Hindu carried an article about on how Delhi University is planning to improve the quality of research. Read the article and you will see that the presumption is that the PhD student would be a male.
Two years back, the PhD scholars gave us all an invitation to a program they were organizing. On top was written our name and below: Dear Sir. Oh! Did they get an earful from us? But sad to say, they still did not get it why we women faculty were furious.