Xref: utzoo comp.edu:3719 uw.general:1963
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Path: utzoo!censor!geac!contact!watcsc!maytag!watmath!mks.com!linda
From: linda@mks.com (Linda Carson)
Subject: Assumptions about sex (Was Re: Recursion Summary)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 90 14:55:11 GMT
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.145511.13202@mks.com>
Organization: Mortice Kern Systems, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Distribution: uw
Reply-To: linda@mks.com (Linda Carson)
References: <1990Oct23.211651.10227@contact.uucp> <1990Oct25.030752.6568@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Summary: Reasons not to use sexual stereotyping in language

In article <1990Oct25.030752.6568@watdragon.waterloo.edu> eafournier@lion.uwaterloo.ca (Wade Richards) writes:
>In article <1990Oct23.211651.10227@contact.uucp> rrwood@contact.uucp (roy wood) writes:
>>And as an interesting side note, I'd like to point out that my original
>>message made no mention of the sex of the person I was trying to convince,
>>yet *everyone* assumed that this person was male.  In fact, she is very
>>much female.  I suppose this is an interesting demonstration of a strong
>>bias or stereotyping among us.  Does anyone want to do a thesis on the
>>subject?
>
>Does this have to be a bias or a stereotype?  Why can't we just notice
>that there are more males in the CS field than there are females, and
>make the statistically most likely correct guess? 
>
"Statistically", Roy has noticed that 100% of the people who responded
to his message *assumed* (without any evidence one way or the other) that
his boss was male. Roy described more of a manager than a computer
scientist. (Roy would not be teaching anyone "in the CS field" about
recursion.) If I were looking for indications of bias, that number would
be pretty impressive -- not conclusive, but then Roy just suggested
it might be a place to start studying.

>It's far too awkword to use (s)he, and for some reason both genders seem
>to object to the gender-neutral `it'. 
>
We could use the colloquial "they" exactly the same way we do in
our day-to-day spoken language:
	"I don't know what your boss studied at school, but they might
	be more convinced by a data processing argument (like sorting &
	searching) than by arithmetic functions (like factorials)."

>Sexual stereotyping seems to be such a popular catch-phrase these days
>that everyone wants to hang that label on anything.  Personally, I think
>that stereotyping is slightly less common than many people would claim. 
>
As a man working in a male-dominated field, you're not in the best
position to witness sexual stereotyping first-hand, of course. *I* think
stereotyping is a great deal more common than most people would admit.
We have different viewpoints.

The idea that you can guess or assume the sex of a person based on
their job, hobbies, accomplishments or professional standing (that is,
"sexual stereotyping") is common to 100% of our sample here, and you
offered a popular rationalization for the practice: statistics. We don't
have to argue about how common it is, Wade. I'd like to talk about some
reasons we might like to stop doing it.

Comedies are full of excruciating moments when the protagonist discovers
they've embarrassed themself mortally by *assuming* someone's boss is
male, or their secretary is female. While I look forward to the day when
my nephews ask me why that ever used to be funny, it's still pretty
awkward to be caught in that situation today. One could embarrass oneself
severely. One could embarrass oneself in a professional setting, as you
can imagine from the case in point. If I submitted my resume to Roy's
boss, beginning with the salutation "Dear Sir", it doesn't matter if
statistics are on my side. It may be an unlikely event that Roy's boss
is a woman, but it's not impossible, and she probably stopped finding
the situation funny after the first year or four. She may well have
lost all sense of fun after the first several times someone mistook her
for her own secretary. I can expect my resume to end up in the circular
file, fast.

So sexual stereotyping could embarrass us or damage us professionally.

For anyone who works in sales (and in some ways, we *all* work in sales),
sexual stereotyping costs customers. If a company's promotional material,
for example, is all addressed exclusively to the largely-male market
base, it alienates women. (It also alienates men who are sensitive to
sexual stereotyping in advertising.) Telephone solicitors who call a single
father at home and insist on speaking to "the woman of the house" are 
never going to sell that man their grocery service, no matter how much
he could use it.

Sexual stereotyping could cost us clients.

The "politically-correct" reasons for avoiding sexual stereotyping are
less concrete, and we may not agree on them. But many people believe
(and I am one of them) that pervasive sexual stereotyping of careers
(such as referring to nurses as "she"...) is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are more men than women in computer science in part because
we expect computer scientists to be men and we reinforce that 
expectation *every time we use a pronoun*. Girls don't see women in the
field. They know, because we talk about "him" and "he", that women
can't enter the field. If they take that as a challenge, we continue
to exclude them once they enter the industry; they may be "she"'s and
"her"'s as individuals, but the general case is still male. Sexual
stereotyping limits women and men to those stereotypes; it tells all
of us what we *cannot* be rather than what we can be.

Sexual stereotyping could cost us fellow professionals. It could
cost our sons and daughters equal opportunity.

>By the way, here are some more "sexual stereotypes" that fall into the
>same catagory: when I refer to a nurse whose gender I don't know, I
>assume female.  If I don't know the gender of a sumo-wrestler, I assume
>male. 
>
My uncle Reg, the nurse, would like to show you a photograph (from
A Day In The Life Of Japan) of female sumo wrestlers.

>And no, I don't have any stastical data to back up my assumption that
>there are many more males working in CS than females, just my own
>perception and informal head-counts. 
>
You're right. There are more men than women in CS. Most educational
institutions and government organizations feel this is a problem and
are working on a number of constructive ways to address it (such as
school visits by women in the sciences and engineering). One of the
things I'm sure they'd all appreciate would be for the rest of us to
stop making things even more difficult than they are.

It takes an effort to strip sexual stereotyping from language. But it's
not rocket science, folks. It's important, and it's worth the
effort.

Linda Carson