Gender in job ads, and subconscious bias in language

You don't know what you are saying.

Sure, you think you know. You've chosen the content of what you want to say. You're thinking about what linguists call the "propositional content," or the "message" of what is being said. The fact is, though, that you're saying so much more. The complexity of language carries all kinds of information about social alignment, and the individual's stance in relation to social groups and in relation to larger discourses in society (other times the same topic has been referenced).

Yesterday I ran across this link through @geardrops on Twitter. I was fascinated, but not at all surprised, given my background in linguistic anthropology. The article talks about a study in which it was demonstrated that job postings contain language that is "gendered," or biased toward either a female or male expectation - and that potential applicants can feel this when they read the postings, and gravitate toward the ones that match their gender. Wow, right? Interesting. Within three minutes of having picked up this link, I ended up in an argument about whether we had left behind bias in the workplace, and whether a person could be considered sexist for writing an ad in this way, and whether or not "gendered" language was just something made up by academics that had no basis in reality. Geardrops' conclusion, which I loved, was this:

"Hey guess what language bias exists and is subtle."

That's right. The social messages in language are not just subtle, they are subconsicous. So let's look at what that means for a second, starting with the question of politeness.

If you ask someone, "You need to ask your professor for a pen. What do you say?" that person will give you an answer, but chances are it won't be exactly what that person would say if you recorded them in the situation. It will be - and this is important - what they think they ought to say. This is a trend backed up by all kinds of politeness research: live recordings will get you different results from what people say they do. In fact, I found precisely this in my own research. When I studied polite and casual forms in Japanese, I asked three teachers how much of each type they thought they were using in the classroom, and each one said they used formal forms most of the time. When I went in, took a videotape, transcribed and counted these forms, it turned out that they were using formal forms 35% of the time.

I'm sure you can see the difference.

The propositional content of what you say is consciously chosen. But for the most part, the manner in which you say it, and the social messages conveyed, are outside of your conscious control.

Can we say that there is "fault" involved, or accuse a person of being sexist, because of what they express in a subconscious manner?

Well, yes and no.

I often imagine language use within a culture as an enormous piece of fabric. Each person's contribution is a tiny thread within that fabric. The color of the fabric varies depending on which part you look at, but each thread will tend to be roughly the same color as the ones around it. We don't speak in a vacuum. The patterns of speech and expression that we use are learned from those around us, and the more closely our color matches the surrounding pattern, the more likely everything is to appear normal. Sexism, racism, and any other -ism that you might care to identify are mostly built into the fabric. If you're a member of an insider group, chances are pretty good that the language use patterns that show bias will be difficult to see. It's the whole "by saying mankind I mean all people" thing. The distinct color of the thread containing the word "man" will be more easily recognized by someone who doesn't match it - i.e. a woman.

I think it's more effective to talk about "gendered language" than "sexist language" because the latter implies intent. Intent is a tricky thing. In our society these days "bias" itself is seen as being wrong - which is I think a good thing - but what it means is that people can get attacked for subconsciously engaging in the fabric of the discourse around them. Should they be blamed? Probably not. Engaged with, probably yes. Every time we question biased language we're acting on the front lines of societal change. Increasing our consciousness of these mostly-invisible markers is the way to get people to notice biases they don't mean to convey, and act to change them.

Here's an important point, though. Social language is not a plus-or-minus proposition. You can go one direction or another on the road, but you're still on the road. We will always, always mark our social position, our posture, relative to others. We will always express our membership in social groups. We will strive to distinguish ourselves from groups that we don't want to be a part of by emphasizing our membership in other groups. I don't see "gendered language" ever going away; I do, however, see it changing.

Language is something that reinforces itself, and at the same time changes itself, every time that it is used.

So to be a positive force for cultural change in the world, think about increasing consciousness - your own as well as that of others. Go easy on yourself - be aware that you yourself are constantly enacting culture and social alignment without thinking, and you won't be able just to "stop." Don't blame yourself terribly if you find yourself doing something you don't want to do - just think through it and try to exert your conscious will to change it. Be willing to engage with others. Be willing to question yourself.

And next time you're looking for a job, be aware of gendered language. Be aware, too, that the person who wrote the ad probably didn't try to exclude anyone. Choose not to let that shut you down.

Change takes time, but it's worth the effort.

The Cultural Question of Girls and Princesses, Boys and Battles

Modern gender culture frustrates me.

I say this as a mother trying to steer a straight course between the Charybdis of Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony - the pink and purple whirlpool where wondering what gift to get for a friend is sufficient central conflict for an entire story - and the Scylla whose many heads are made of battle weapons, battling monsters, battling robots, battling aliens... battling everything. I walk into clothing stores and head for the clearance racks because at least there the clothes are all in one place and not divided into "boy's side" and "girl's side." Why do people insist on painting our children in pink and blue?

I'm not trying to say that we haven't come a long way. Certainly we're in an age of coed universities, coed dorms. We can tell girls that they can be anything they like - inventors, astronauts, scientists, mothers, writers... It's important to be aware, though, that the old way remains. It's embedded in our institutions, but most importantly, it's embedded in our subconscious. Because I'm an anthropologist and very culturally self-conscious I thought through what I wanted to do about gender with my kids well before they arrived, but because I'm a realist I knew, even then, that there would be gendered things in the way I treated my children.

I'm okay with this, actually. To eradicate distinctions of gender would be to create a world of unisex robots that all looked the same. In fact, I think just the opposite should be our goal: to recognize the nuances of gender, and diversify our understanding just as we diversify our understanding of races and world cultures. The most important part of it for me is cultivating self-awareness and openness to other people's understanding of themselves.

Feminism has played a terribly important role in all of the freedoms I have today, and I am grateful for it, but I hate to read articles describing women being criticized for embracing roles that are considered "traditional," or for dressing in a feminine way. Part of the liberation of women is freeing women to take on roles traditionally assigned to men - that is certain, for keeping women confined to those roles is misogynistic. However, it is also misogynistic to say that the traditional roles and concerns of women have no value. Indeed, any individual, however they may define their own gender, should be free to embrace these roles without censure; only then can we see true balance.

Can we teach our daughters to be critical thinkers and reject pandering advertising that tries to define them restrictively? Yes. But when we express our extreme distaste for artificial princess garb or dolls with unrealistic body shapes, we must at least explain ourselves. There's a huge risk here of making our daughters feel shame for liking what they may simply like for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Whenever we shame our girls for being who they are, we're doing the male chauvinists' job for them. In the same way, we should teach our sons to reject the advertising that tries to define them by encouraging "boys will be boys" excesses and suppressing the flexibility of their thinking, while at the same time recognizing value in the skills they learn and turning it to best effect in other aspects of their lives.

There's another trend in modern thought about gender that bothers me, and I believe it is related to the shaming of girls (and boys) for liking feminine things. This is the idea that oppressed women have been, and still are, entirely powerless; that females of the modern age should reject the women of the past because of their helpless submission to partriarchy. Ironically, I see this trend in all sorts of stories (and associated products) that are supposedly linked to "girl power." These are unrealistic stories in which a female placed in a past historical setting will feel ill-used, rail against the restrictions that confine her, and set out to break down those restrictions and "follow her dream." You might ask at this point, "How can it be bad to follow your dream?" - and I understand the point. However, too often these characters have dreams that could not possibly have grown out of to the actual social context of their lives - the kind of dreams that could only be conceived by a girl in a post-feminism world. Thus the characters will rail against a life that, because every aspect of it is normal and has been since their birth, should not be foremost in their attention at all. Instead, they would more realistically set themselves against injustices that stand out against that context. Lastly, too often the women of the past (real or fictional) are given no credit for understanding the complex rules within which the nature of their power is defined. Whatever tools of influence they possess, however small, they will learn to use to greatest possible effect.

If there is any testament to the flexibility of human nature, it is this ability we have to take what we are given by circumstance and make the most of it. Which is why I refuse to demean my children for learning what society hands to them, at the same time that I try to help them think beyond it.

Fascinating post about gendered responses to viewing nudes

I came across this link today, which was traveling across Twitter, and clicked over. From the point of view of an anthropologist, this is fascinating. Here's the opener from the article by Dr. Lisa Wade (no relation):

Last year in a post about the truism “sex sells,” I asked:

But whose sex is sold? And to who?

“If it was simply that sex sold,” I continued…

…we’d see men and women equally sexually objectified in popular culture. Instead, we see, primarily, women sold to (presumably heterosexual) men. So what are we selling, exactly, if not “sex”?

I argued that what was really being sold was men’s (presumably heterosexual) sexual subjectivity, the experience of being a person in the world who was presented with images that were for his titillation. Women do not live in the world this way.


The author then follows up with a study on male and female responses to viewing nudes. It's absolutely fascinating, and I highly encourage you to look.

More thoughts on Language and Thought, and gender

I've been sharing multiple links recently about the relationship between language and thought. One is this one from the Wall Street Journal; another is this one from the New York Times. Here's a quote that I found particularly interesting:

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

This brings us (and Guy Deutscher, the author of the NYTimes piece) back to issues I've discussed like grammatical gender and relative versus absolute direction, as well as others like the defining of time periods (past, present, future). Here's another terrific quote from the article:

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

This really spoke to me. As a speaker of French, I have always found it difficult to remember the grammatical gender of words. I know a large core number, but once I start getting to the periphery of that, I start having to guess. It's so frustrating! For the first time, during my visit to France this summer, I started having a glimpse of the worldview that lies behind knowing all these grammatical genders - the fact that when a French speaker (or Spanish speaker, etc.) looks at an object, it simply appears inherently masculine or feminine. We English speakers have an easy time differentiating between events in the past, the present, and the future, which our language requires us to specify.

While I'm not sure I could attempt it without living in France, I got a glimpse of what the world might look like if I thought in this way. It really stretched my mind into a place beyond where it had been before, and that's one of the most rewarding feelings I can imagine. Perhaps that's why I try to share it with other people through my stories.

Kitchen design - a feminist revolution?

It's a red-letter day for interesting links! Here's one I picked up thanks to my friend Tanja Nathanael, about how the advent of kitchen design (in 1926) was actually intended to raise the kitchen to a worthy status, and the woman working in it, too.

Putting your self into your voice

This post will be a quick one, because BayCon starts today, but I wanted to follow up on my thoughts about tone of voice that came up in the post about channels of communication.

When we speak, we communicate a lot more than just the words we say. We convey emotional messages, too. Sometimes those involve emphasis on elements of language, and sometimes they are more general-level emotional. Tone of voice can convey basic emotions like happiness and sadness, but it also conveys aspects of our sense of self - like refinement, receptiveness to approach, and gender identity. These factors can vary across cultures.

Think about the female intonation pattern that ends each sentence with a question-like rise in pitch. Not all American females use this, though I know it is very common for many Californians. When a person uses this, it makes them sound uncertain, but it also gives an impression of "cute and feminine" for some. I'm not going to go into the larger feminist issues surrounding the femininity of uncertainty here, but suffice it to say for now that adopting an intonation pattern like this can give several impressions:

1. Uncertainty
2. Cuteness
3. Femininity
4. Annoyingness

The interesting part to me is that the choice of the rising intonation pattern is not likely to be made consciously, and that it does have a definite effect of annoying people who aren't accustomed to it, i.e. who haven't learned, or accepted, the association of this pattern with femininity.

Here's a second example, in differences between English and Japanese. In English, a male speaking voice is considered to be attractive when it's low but relatively smooth. A female speaking voice is higher, but when it's pitched to be sultry and attractive, it's lower. In the context of popular singing, high male (tenor) voices often make for success, as do lower women's voices. [Though this is of course not exclusive, and both very low male and very high female voices are an important part of opera.] The contrast in Japanese is that the manly male voice is low and not necessarily smooth, and the attractive female voice differs even further, being quite high-pitched and airy. If you've ever watched Pokémon videos you might have noticed that the female character's voice is quite high and can sounds to an English-speaker's ear overly perky and babyish. A lower tone of voice in females is not considered attractive, but rather masculine, and indicates lack of refinement.

What does that mean for someone like me, a learner of Japanese who is initially an English speaker? Well, in fact it has interesting consequences. If I speak Japanese in the same tone of voice that I'm accustomed to using in English, I don't come across as "myself." I suppose I'd describe my intended manner as feminine but confident and straightforward - but the tone that accomplishes this in English is much lower than it is in Japanese. So, to portray myself as myself in Japanese, I speak Japanese in a higher pitch than I do English. English speakers often find this funny, and it is, even for me.

I think there are lots of possibilities for playing with this in subtle ways in a story. Xinta, one of the characters who appears in my novelette "The Eminence's Match," has quite a high voice. This to him is partly his natural voice (tenor) and partly a sign of refinement - but to members of the undercaste he encounters in the novel where he appears, it makes him appear very feminine. This entirely changes their assessment of what he's capable of, and leads them (for example) to underestimate him as a fighter.

It's something to think about.

Gender: real and grammatical

Dave (a.k.a. Meindzai) directed me to this terrific NPR article, and asked me if I had any experience with the idea of grammatical gender interacting with real gender.

Oh, yes, indeed.

In case you haven't gone over to the article, I'll give you an idea of what it says: people who have grammatical gender in their languages will tend to describe nouns in ways that give them characteristics associated with actual physical genders.

I once read a study (and I wish I could now remember which one) that said that young children who spoke languages with grammatical gender were able to identify their own gender earlier than those who didn't. And, no surprise, children who were asked to assign voices to cartoon characters of objects would give male voices to the grammatically male objects, and female voices to the grammatically female objects. This was not the case with English-speaking kids who haven't had to develop such awareness.

Your native language fundamentally influences how you characterize objects and their relations to one another. For example, a picture is "on" the wall in English, but "up (op)" the wall in Dutch. If you ask friends who speak other languages, you'll be surprised how many tiny subtle differences you'll find.

It might be fascinating to consider putting this distinction, or some other seemingly arbitrary grammatical distinction, into a story. I'm guessing you could get cool misunderstandings, or even disasters similar to that resulting from English vs. metric measurement. I remember hearing that a famous linguist got his inspiration from the idea that words had power over thought, such as when people labeled gasoline cans as "empty" and people were negligent around them, believing they were safe when in fact the gasoline vapor made them far more dangerous around sparks than when they were full.

Feel free to comment, Dave (or anyone else!), if you'd like to further the discussion.

Sleepwear!

This morning I told my daughter I'd mentioned her on the forums, discussing the comic books that we just bought for her and her brother (Supergirl and Spiderman, respectively), and she suggested that I should mention her new pajamas. So here I am.

There's actually more in sleepwear as a topic than you might think (there always is). Do people dress for bed? Or do they undress for bed? Do they wear hats in bed (remember The Night Before Christmas?) to keep from being cold? Or would sleepwear be considered a waste of money because it's a piece of clothing no one but the family sees?

Actually, this is not true, as my daughter just wore her new pajama top to preschool. It's purple with black trim, an image of a black kitten on a broomstick, and the words "Spooky but Sweet."

This brings me to color and gender.

As we were walking up to the store, my son was saying he wanted Spiderman pj's, and we were joking with him, suggesting that he get bright pink with orange flowers and purple stripes - he said that would be girly (he's learned that, but not from me!), but actually I don't think even my daughter would want to wear something with that design. I suggested maybe it was just "too much." My husband mentioned fairies and we collectively bemoaned the fact that so few people in this world know about the cool and awesome male fairies that are out there. (Don't get me started on Disney Princesses, a good few of whom aren't even princesses but are still trying to take over the world of small females.)

When you think about it, gender assignment of colors etc. is a lot like manners. If you ask someone what they would say in a polite social situation, they will tend to tell you what they believe they should say, rather than what they would actually say. And if you ask people which colors, or symbols, go with which gender, they'll have very clear ideas. Fortunately, if you look out into the world beyond clothes-and-toys-marketing-for-children, you'll soon realize there's a lot more nuance out there than you think. Even Disney has to bow to the fact that the market is not all for pink and purple - which is why I was able some time ago to find my daughter some Lilo pajamas which were turquoise and orange and absolutely gorgeous.

Don't get me wrong - I love pink and purple myself. But at least for our family, love of the color purple transcends all boundaries. All four of us love it.

Thanks, with hugs, to Nonny for suggesting the topic.