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GrammarTalk 18 - 21 May 2008 - Main.AndrewGradman
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Eben made many corrections on students' papers involving number-agreement. For example, "Why does everyone ignore their passions?," as opposed to, say, "Why does everyone ignore (his) / (her) / (his or her) passions?" | | | A father and his daughter get into a terrible car accident. They are taken to separate rooms of the hospital. The doctor in charge of the girl looks at her and says, "I can't operate. She's my daughter." Still surprised?
Michael:
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< | If the gender of the pronoun "my" followed the gender of the words "she-daughter"/"he-son" surrounding it, then your example cannot help us know whether people assume a default male gender in general. That means that if we experiment with the terms of your story -- sometimes substituting "daughter" for "son", and at other times replacing "physician" with "secretary," "ballet dancer," "teacher," or "nurse" -- the "daughter" substitution should best alleviate reader confusion about the ambiguously gendered character's gender. In which case, the outrage feminists feel when readers "default" the physician to male is really just an artifact of the author's choice to make the ambiguously-gendered, but male-associated, "my" refer unambiguously to a physician. | >
> | If the gender of the pronoun "my" followed the gender of the words "she-daughter"/"he-son" surrounding it, then your example cannot help us know whether people assume a default male gender in general. That means that if we experiment with the terms of your story -- sometimes substituting "daughter" for "son", and at other times replacing "doctor" with "secretary," "ballet dancer," "teacher," or "nurse" -- the "daughter" substitution should best alleviate reader confusion about the ambiguously gendered character's gender. In which case, the outrage feminists feel when readers "default" the doctor to male is really just an artifact of the author's choice to make the male-biased "my" refer unambiguously to a doctor. | | | -- AndrewGradman - 20 May 2008 | | |
Andrew, I'm not sure I understand the takeaway, but I do appreciate the point about various occupations and characteristics being gendered one way or the other, not all of them male. But I submit that many occupations which are currently split 50-50 by gender in real life (college students, for example, where females make up slightly more than 50% of the pool) retain a default male connotation. So, the sentence "The college student did his taxes on time" is easier to process than "The college student did her taxes on time." Now, of course, this is nothing more than my intuition. However, it could be tested experimentally, and I suspect that one would be able to show that cognitive processing of the first version is easier than the second. If true, this would be an interesting result, given that America today is roughly equally split between male and female college students. | |
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- If you thought I was making a point about the gendering of occupations, then one of us has much worse language problems than number agreement. My point was that the reason people assume the doctor is male is because her child is male ("he's my son"), NOT because she is a doctor, or because her gender is left unstated. So what does your story tell us about bias? -- AndrewGradman - 21 May 2008
| | | -- MichaelBerkovits - 20 May 2008 |
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