Quote from a Flagpole article comparing UGA and Ga. Tech:
Before a student can begin to understand engineering, he or she must have a steady foundation in physics, chemistry, mathematics and other fields; before a student can become a programmer ready for the corporate world, he must have the practice of writing thousands upon thousands of lines of code.
Clearly, this is blatant sexism. In the first clause, the author uses “he or she”, since a student of enigeering can be either male or female. But in the second clause, the author uses just “he” — implying that only males can be programmers. One cannot use the “technically, that’s proper grammar” argument here, since the author did use “he or she” once already.
Ladies, looks like we gotta keep fightin’ the good fight!
On another note, Flagpole has changed its website to PHP (and also, apparently, a new server). Muy interesante.
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12 Responses to "Flagpole, why you got to do me like that??"
Cleary it’s not sexism, I mean there are studies out there that point to the fact that men’s minds are more analytical and designed for math and stuff while women’s brains are designed for flower arranging, interior-decorating and baby-making. /sarcasm
However, I’m giving the Flagpole the benefit of the doubt, as I don’t think this indicates anything more than the misogyny of the author (or his bad grammar skills). Personally, I use the term s/he to denote variability of gender when writing. I find that it clears up any confusion or suspicion of bias. Personally, I think all Constitutions, law books, government documents and public speech standards should be rewritten to reflect the (still a work in progress) gender equality of our time.
It’s bizarre to me that while women have all the rights on paper (and make up a majority of the population) that it should still be considered proper to denote ‘he’ the gender neutral term. If anything, it should be ’she’ since that’s more representative of the population. Let’s see how the Christian fundies like that.
I’m also giving Flizzagpizzole (and the guy who wrote the article) the benefit of the doubt… he probably just didn’t catch it while proof-reading. I’ve definitely made innocent mistakes and had people pick them apart. Not that my post wasn’t wrought with sarcasm, of course.
Linguistics nerd aside: not many people know that ‘wrought’ is the past tense of ‘work’.
Let’s see how the Christian fundies like that.
Curious. What’s this got to do with fundamentalism?
/wanna be startin’ somethin’
(ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa)
Linguistically, I was thinking today about nouns ending in -sis, and how their plurals are -ses. Just one of those random Why-am-I-thinking-about-this? moments in my day.
I think the guy just made a mistake. I just find it interesting in some scholarly articles that I read, that the author just goes back in forth between “he” and “she” when talking about a generic person. I always say “he or she”… Ah well.
Amber, women can’t be programmers.
I would like something as revolutionary as the “Ms.” title to replace the awkward “he or she” and the use of slashes that has no place in most writing.
I really hope the “Christian Fundies” was directed at Charles. It would be hilarious if it was, since he’s one of the *only* people I know that uses “she” and “her” (female pronouns only) in everything he writes!
Uh, Russ, my guess is that the “christian fundies” thing was more of a generalized statement about a population at large… not pointing a finger at any 1 person.
I thought the consensus achieved in the earlier discussion about gender was that there are not two genders, but a “spectrum” of many various, and not atomistic, identities.
So, wouldn’t ‘he or she’ or ’s/he’ exclude peoples just as much as ‘he’ does? Correcting such a problem by being even more exclusive (because by deigning to be somewhat inclusive we are electing to reinforce the already excluded further) is not a solution. Perhaps, then, something such as what Adrian proposes is in order: a fluctuating pronoun, as opposed to a sterile “neutral” one.
Let’s see how the totalitarian liberals like that.
This “totalitarian liberal” likes that idea. Suggestions? You can only use the “one,” “individual,”, and “person” so many times and not get tired of it.
êt, ês, êun.
A software programmer should know ês work.
A doctor is faced with a difficult task: êt copes with many situations that demand ês expertise and ês skill.
You should get to know your local garbagêum. You can even ask êun some questions, and ês answers might just surpise you!
This is not a bad idea. Many languages have non-gender-specific pronouns — Swahili, for example; some of the Romance languages; and many, many others. In Swahili, yeye is equivalent to “he/him; she/her”. A- is used as the third-person subject of a verb (Swahili verbs always carry the subject and tense within the word itself). Yake is the third-person possessive pronoun (equivalent to “his, her, hers”).
Charles, where did you come up with those words?
There is a movement among the genderqueer community (that seems to be growing among younger people out of the glbt) to use pronouns like zhe, or ze, or zim or something like that. I’m not sure exactly what the words are, but there are a lot of people that are already for this.