via reddit.com
The fact that she’s a woman
Her husband’s job
Her child-care arrangements
How she nurtures her underlings
How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
How she’s such a role model for other women
How she’s the “first woman to…”
Okay, one quote, and then you absolutely have to read the whole thing.
Still, the virtue of some rules in Aschwanden’s test is difficult to see at first. Take the rule of “no firsts.” In the comments section below her post for Last Word on Nothing, Finkbeiner explained that no sooner had she taken the vow to ignore gender, than she caught herself writing that the astronomer she was profiling was the first to win a certain award. After a reader urged her to stick to her pledge, she removed it.
“The fact that she’s the first woman to do that says a lot more about the prize-giving committee than it does about her,” Finkbeiner explained in our interview. “So if I were going to put that into a story, it would be a story about prejudice in that prize committee.”
It blew my mind, because she’s right. The fact that there’s some many firsts left is the result of bias in the committees NOT IN THE WORK WOMEN DO
This would make sense to me except that I can’t understand how a news story could ever actually pass this test, because in order to even test it, we would have to know that it was about a woman… thus the article would automatically break Rule 1 (mention “the fact that she’s a woman”)
hmm, I suppose we could subject it to the test assuming we independently knew the subject’s gender from some other source
(actually, what counts as mentioning the fact that she’s a woman? Does it require saying the word “woman”? Does using she/her pronouns count? Can it only pass the test by using gender-neutral pronouns or none?)
(And, oh, does “female scientist” have a different meaning from “woman” for these purposes?)
I think the idea would be to simply use “she” pronouns when writing about the person, and not calling attention to it by for example calling her a “female/woman scientist”.
This also reminds me of how Wendy Carlos has expressed irritation at being written about as “the trans music composer”, with many articles about her being more about her gender than her music work. In that case, I think it’s a slightly more tricky dilemma, since on the one hand, representation is important, but on the other, it’s difficult to give a “subtle” indication without outright stating “she is trans”. Just using “she” pronouns isn’t enough if a reader isn’t already aware of her being trans.
(I can definitely sympathize with Carlos not wanting to discuss or call attention to her gender since, among other things she’s had to deal with, I am aware of at least two different songs by different artists that deadnames her in the lyrics.)
Mm, yeah, these are all very important points.
It is really very strange, when you think about it, that out of all the types of demographics we can strive to represent in writing, “gender” is the only one that automatically represents itself in pronouns.
I guess the closest thing other than gender is that some names (both given names and surnames) can give a fair hint at race or nationality. But no pronouns for that.
And even pronouns give very limited information about gender. Like you said, going by “she” pronouns doesn’t say anything about whether you’re a cis woman or trans woman – and it doesn’t necessarily even mean you identify with the noun “woman” at all.
Which I think is fine, mostly. Might be nice if it conveyed even less info! It would be great if we could talk about people while focusing as little as possible on demographic details that are not relevant to what we’re discussing.
And I know that’s an ideal that can’t always be reached… especially as the details so often are relevant in some way, and we do sometimes need to write the stories about bias in the award committee or whatever.
But yeah, it is really worth thinking about whether such a detail even needs to be mentioned, in any given setting.