I've had to confront my southern accent a few times in my life to get taken seriously. Moving from rural North Carolina to attend college in Chapel Hill, I had

I've had to confront my southern accent a few times in my life to get taken seriously. Moving from rural North Carolina to attend college in Chapel Hill, I had to "scrub the rural from my voice." When I went to graduate school in New York, I tried my best to coach myself to a "flat American accent," which carried me well through the midwest when I later moved to Ohio. One of the small joys of my life right now is working with folks with thick accents in positions of seniority. At my previous job, we had a chief scientist who also came from NC. At one point, he told me that he'd suppressed his accent until he was promoted past the level where anyone could judge how he said things instead of what he said.