Your degrees won't protect you. Your degree doesn't make your life more valuable, but sadly, our society, even in the most innocent ways, often feels that one needs to parade one's credentials when tragedy strikes, and even more for a woman of color. The murder of Dr. Cerina Fairfax by her estranged husband hit me deeply as a life was taken violently, and the aftermath that was left. Before the grief had time to land, people started reciting her accomplishments.
The degrees, the dental practice, and the community work are pushed as part of a marketing campaign to validate her life and legitimize her agency, as if the goal were to establish that her life had been worth something before someone took it. That impulse revealed more than it intended to.
We have been collectively taught that credentials are a form of protection. If a woman builds enough proof of her value, the world will respond accordingly. Dr. Fairfax had done everything that promise required of her.
Your degrees won't protect you. What I want to examine in this post is why so many of us are still operating as if they will, and what it costs us to keep running that program.
The Legitimization Reflex
There is a particular pattern that shows up whenever a woman is harmed publicly, and it is especially visible when that woman holds intersecting identities.
The response almost always includes a recitation of what she accomplished. What she built. What she contributed. The implicit logic being: look at what she was. Look at what we lost.
I understand why people do this. It comes from grief. It comes from wanting to make the loss register in a way that demands a response. But underneath it lies an assumption that deserves questioning: that value requires evidence. A woman's life becomes more worth protecting once it has proven productive.
That assumption is one that many of us have absorbed and act on daily, often without realizing it.
What I Was Taught to Believe
I was raised on a very specific promise. Get the grades. Go to college. And the years of poverty, the weight of being a woman navigating spaces not designed for you, would somehow resolve. You would finally be taken seriously. You would finally be safe enough.
That promise has not held up. I know this not just intellectually but from two decades of trying to honor it. For most of my corporate life, I operated by suppressing the parts of myself that felt like liabilities. I adjusted how I dressed, how I carried myself, how much I revealed. The goal, beneath it all, was to communicate that I was acceptable. That I was not a disruption. That I had earned my place.
I recently completed my MSW, and I am in the middle of intentionally not pursuing the traditional path that would follow. Part of what made that decision difficult was confronting how much of my ambition had been driven not by genuine desire but by a need to be legitimized. To have enough proof that my perspective was worth taking seriously.
Imposter syndrome in high-achieving women often has less to do with actual competence and more to do with the internalized belief that you are always one credential away from being enough. That belief does not go away when you add another degree. It waits for the next threshold.
The Real Cost of Operating Outside of Alignment
When you spend extended time performing a version of yourself built around what is acceptable rather than what is true, it shows up somewhere. It shows up in health. In the quality of your relationships. In a persistent sense of disconnection from your own desires that is difficult to name but impossible to ignore.
This is not abstract. Research consistently links chronic identity suppression, particularly for women navigating structurally hostile environments, to elevated stress responses, burnout, and long-term health impacts. The body keeps an accounting even when the mind has convinced itself that it is fine.
The fastest way to lose access to what is genuinely good in you is to spend your energy maintaining a version of yourself designed for someone else's comfort.
That is not strength. It is a slow erosion dressed up as discipline.
Women, Worth, and the Conditioning We Pass On
Women are conditioned from early on to tie their value to what they produce or prove. This shows up differently depending on the path, career, motherhood, and relationship, but the underlying structure is the same. Worth is something you demonstrate. Safety is something you earn by becoming legible to the people who are deciding.
The intersection matters here, and I do not want to move past it. As a woman, identity is where I begin. But the data on what happens to women, specifically to women who also carry the weight of racial identity in a society still working out what it believes about that, is not something I can responsibly leave out.
The conditioning that contributes to this is not only external. We also pass it to each other and to the next generation. When we communicate directly or indirectly that a woman's value lies in what she accomplishes, we are not preparing young women for the world. We are preparing them to exhaust themselves trying to earn a safety that was never up for exchange.
A woman is worthy as she is. Not as she proves herself to be.
Reflection
I want to leave you with two questions, and I'd ask that you stay with them rather than answering quickly.
Where in your life are you pursuing achievement primarily as a means of feeling safe or finally enough, rather than as an expression of what genuinely calls you?
There is no wrong answer. But there is often a difference between the two, and it is worth knowing which one is driving you.
In what ways have you reinforced — in the women around you or in yourself — the idea that worth must be demonstrated before it is real?
This one tends to show up in small moments more than grand gestures. The way we respond to a woman's accomplishments versus her struggles. What we lead with when we describe ourselves. What we teach without meaning to.
Legitimization is not protection. It never was. And building our sense of value around it is a framework that will ask more of us than it ever gives back.
Closing
Your accolades are real. The work you have put in is real. None of that is the point. The point is that none of it was ever the source of your worth. It was always already there before the degrees, before the titles, before you had anything to prove.
Pursuing a career, a doctorate, or a business because it genuinely calls you is a worthy thing. Pursuing it because you believe it will finally make you enough is a different pursuit entirely, and it tends to lead to an exhausting place.
Your degrees won't protect you. But knowing, actually knowing, that your value is not contingent on what you achieve might be the most clarifying shift you can make. Not because it changes the world. The world has its own work to do. But because a woman who is not confused about her worth is not easily convinced she has to earn the right to take up space.
That is not something a credential gives you. It is something you return to.
I go deeper on this on my podcast, Mystique Femininity. The conversation there picks up where posts like this leave off.