This is androcentrism = In the above picture the figure on the left clearly represents a “male” person. But when the figure on the left appears by itself (eg. on emergency exit or street signs) the figure on the left is supposed to represent the “generic” person.

Road signs almost always use male figures to represent a generic ’human being’ (they use figures that are identical to the ones used to indicate the ’mens toilet’). A few places around the world have started to use female figures (alongside male figures) to represent a generic person in road signs.

Spot the odd ones out:

Some sites have genderless avatars. The rest have male default avatars. For instance, Facebook has a male avatar as it’s default (specifically, a white male). Some sites have opted for orange avatars and smiley faces so that white + male doesn’t continue to be the default human being.

I google image searched “default avatar”. The majority of default avatar’s were male. None of the default avatar’s for both genders were female. Below are the results from my google image search. Of the ones that seem to be more one gender than the other, what gender are they closest to? What colours are they (and why)?

FACEBOOK AVATAR

Male characters outnumber female characters three to one in the most successful films seen by children (according to a 2006 study conducted by actor Geena Davis and her colleagues, called ‘Where the Girls Aren’t'). They studied 101 films and found that just 28 per cent of characters with speaking roles were female and 17 per cent of crowd scene characters were female. More than 80 per cent of narrators in the films were male. Of the 101 films, 71 per cent were animated or partly animated features. Among the films examined were Finding Nemo, The Lion King, Monsters, Inc., Chicken Run and Toy Story.

Davis commented, “It’s important [that children] see the real world reflected, to see men and women, boys and girls, sharing the space. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.”

The study was commissioned by See Jane, part of the US-based advocacy group Dads & Daughters which encourages an accurate representation of gender balance in films and television shows directed at children. Joe Kelly, a co-founder of Dads & Daughters, said the study caused him to reconsider Toy Story, ”I went back and realised there’s only one toy that’s a female character, and it’s Bo Peep. She’s standing at the window going, ‘Oh, Woody, don’t hurt yourself’.”

Disney, Paramount and Universal all declined to comment on the study.

Book after book demonstrates to little girls that only boys are centre-stage, only boys have fun, only boys are interesting enough to write about (or to have adventures that don’t involve fairies).

Jan M. Ochman (1996)[8] studies some of the effects of non-gender role stereotypes in children’s literature on children’s self esteem. It was found that girls had a greater increase in self-esteem if they heard stories about an achieving girl rather than an achieving boy. Boys showed a comparable pattern; their self-esteem increased after they heard stories about an achieving boy rather than an achieving girl. This implies that if children hear stories about strong, competent boys, but not girls, the boys are most likely to experience an increase in self-esteem, whereas the girls’ self-esteem will not improve.

 Radical Misfit Eeni B. Bella has written several brilliant posts about the “male default” in children’s books. She randomly choose books from one shelf on a the children’s bookcase that was in her local community centre to see what the ratio was for male to female characters. There were 28

books on the shelf. Sixteen of them had more male characters than female, two books had ONLY male characters, and 4 books had 1 or more characters that were definitely male and other characters of undetermined sex. Four books had an equal number of male and female characters. 10 books had male protagonists, 1 had a female protagonist (the rest didn’t have protagonists). No book had more male than female characters.  2 books had only male characters, and no books had only female characters. She noted that Dr Seuss rarely uses female characters, that Franklin books have predominantly male characters, and that Winnie thas only male characters except for Kanga.

he Pooh

Radical Misfit Eeni B Bella spent a year mastering the art of using “she” instead of “he” as the default pronoun. Most children were startled when they started hearing her do this, and she lists some of their responses in her post. I’ve reproduced a bit of her post here, but please check out her original post, it is really interesting:

I was watching a squirrel with a 3-year-old girl.  We were sitting silent and still so as not to scare the animal, and occasionally whispering about the squirrel’s activity, when I said “Her tail is twitching” – the girl I was with loudly blurted out, “The squirrel has a vagina??” and the squirrel ran away!  I hadn’t been talking about the squirrel’s sex directly at all!

When I’m out in nature with one particular 4-yr-old boy, and he points out a bird, and I say, e.g., “I wonder where she’s going,” he semi-snaps at me, “Maybe it’s a boy.  You don’t know!”  I reply with total calm, “Yup, maybe it’s a boy, maybe it’s a girl… we don’t know!”

Once I was in the sandbox with a 3-year-old boy who was watching a toad, and called it “he.”  I called it “she”.  The boy had no visible reaction, but called the toad “she” in his next sentence, as if he took it for granted that I knew the toad was female and was self-correcting.  But 2 or 3 sentences later, he had reverted back to “he,” also without really seeming to notice what he was doing.

One time, I brought a 10-yr-old girl to the pet store so she could buy two pet mice.  The mice were separated by sex, females in one cage, males in another.  The girl knew she wanted two female mice and chose 2 feminine names for them, yet she and the saleswoman both referred to ALL of the mice in the female cage as “he” the entire time!  e.g. “Oh look at that one; he’s so active!  He’s stepping on his sister!”  It was pretty amazing to witness.

A 3 year old boy asked me, in reference to a toy dinosaur, “Does he bite?”
I replied, looking thoughtfully at the dinosaur, “Hmm, I don’t know if she bites.”
He looked at me in surprise.  “Did you say ‘she’??”

“Yup,” I replied.  “Maybe that dinosaur is a girl!”
“No!” he said, laughing.
“Why not?”
“Because NO dinosaur is a girl!”

In a recent Canadian survey, people were asked whether they intended to vote in the next election or not. 68% of men and 78% of women reported that they intended to vote.

Okay, now jot down all the reasons that you can think of for such a gender difference…. keep jotting… don’t scroll down until you have finished your list of potential reasons for the gender difference….

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…. Have you finished jotting down all your reasons? Good! Scroll down a bit more…

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Purpose of the test that I got you to do: The point of this test was simply to see whether you took male to be the norm and explained away the ‘female difference’, or vice versa (or whether it was equal). When my dad did the test he was defensive about this and said, “but look! I used more positive reasons when talking about women, than I did when talking about the men!” Whether you did that or not is entirely irrelevant to the purpose of the test. The test was not to see whether you had a negative bias against women or men, the test was simply to see which gender (if any) was the ‘standard human gender’ in your subconscious mind.

 If you took male to be the norm (by explaining the gender difference in terms of “why women are different to men” instead of “why men are different to women”) that indicates that you subconsciously think of men as the “standard human being”. My hypothesis is that you tended to do that.

Look over you list of reasons and note :

1. How many of your reasons described why women answered differently to men (eg. “women are more responsible”) ?

2. How many of your reasons described why men answered differently to women (eg. “men tend to be busier than women”)?

Researchers have done a controlled experiment using various versions of the statement that you just read (sometimes reversing the percentages of 78% and 68%, sometimes listing the women’s percentage first, and sometimes listing the men’s percentage first). I can’t find a link to that study anymore, but I remember what the results showed.

In that controlled experiment, the reasons that people gave described why women were different to men more frequently than they described why men were different to women.

A small minority of women keep their own surname on marriage. A small minority of women double-barrel their own surname with their husbands’ surname (and a smaller minority of men will reciprocate by double-barrelling their own surnames).

Androcentric example 3(b): Daddy’s surname only is usually passed onto daughters and sons. Some places are better than English-speaking countries, for instance, Latin America. In Latin America All children have double-barrelled surnames from both parents. BUT on marriage all children (both male and female) replace their mother’s surname with the surname of their father-in-law.

Androcenric example 3(c): Surnames are commonly patronymic (based on a male first name) but rarely matronynmic. Most gendered suffixes and prefixes are masculine (usually meanin ‘son of’), for instance: Mac-, Mc-, Ó-, -ks, -s, -son, -zoon, -sz, -se, -sen.

The top 24 most common surnames in the UK include no feminine names, but 14 masculine names: Jones, Davis, Evans, Wilson, Thomas, Johnson, Roberts, Robinson, Thompson, Edwards, Hughes, Lewis, Harris & Lucas. The rest are place names or occupational names.

According to Wikipedia, common English matronyms include Beaton, Custer, Tiffany, Parnell, Hilliard, Marriott, Ibbetson, Babbs, and Megson. How many people do you know with these surnames? I don’t know any.

> Men go by surname only, women have to use a title (not all the time, but in some situations).

A lawyer called Alex Jones, standing before a Judge, would be addressed as “Jones” if male, but as “Ms Jones” if she was female.

I presume this is because when women were allowed to become lawyers it was considered important to expressly distinguish between a male and a female lawyer in legal writings (eg. law reports). My only guess as to the reason for this is, perhaps it was so that more weight could be placed on a male lawyer’s ‘more rational’ arguments.

1 guy + 1 girl = 2 ‘guys’

Androcentric example 2(b): The male noun is almost always the root noun, and the female noun is an extension of that. Suffixes such as -ess and -ix are commonly added to make a generic male noun ‘female’ (there are no common suffixes I know of that make any generic female nouns ‘male’).

eg.

waiter – waitress

actor – actress

steward – stewardess

avator – avatrix

comedian – comedianne

master – mistress

prince – princess

Two examples where the female noun is the root word:

bride – bridegroom

widow – widower

* Notice that these two female-root-nouns are both to do with marriage. I don’t know if there are any others. Another noun that is considered ‘female’ is prostitute, and because of this, the phrase “male prostitute” is commonly used to distinguish gender.

 Androcentric Example 1 = the word “man” means not only “men” but also “humankind”. Languages reflect our society and the way we think. Thus, in English speaking societies, men (more than women) are seen as generic representations of humankind. The same is true for all the Romance languages (as well as many other languages) (eg. the Spanish word for man, “hombre”, has the same double meaning that the English word ”man” has).

 Man = n. , pl. men . An adult male human. A human regardless of sex or age; a person.

“Traditionally, many writers have used man and words derived from it to designate any or all of the human race regardless of sex. In fact, this is the oldest use of the word. In Old English the principal sense of man was “a human,” and the words wer and wyf were used to refer to “a male human” and “a female human” respectively. But in Middle English man displaced wer as the term for “a male human,” while wyfman (which evolved into present-day woman) was retained for “a female human.” Despite this change, man continued to carry its original sense of “a human” as well.”

“Man” evolved to mean not just “humans” but also ”men only” because all the writers and philosophers were male and they wrote from a male viewpoint, with women being included more as an afterthought (as ‘wives of the men’).  Hence, writings about “man” (‘man’ meaning ‘human’) came to be understood as writings primarily about men rather than as writings about all people equally. Therefore the word “man” meaning “human” came to have a different (but closely related) meaning of “men”.

The word “man” is not synonymous with the words “humankind” or “people”. While “humankind” is always gender-neutral, the word “man”, even when intended to mean ”humankind”, retains a gendered meaning to some extent. See the following examples (given by Janice Moulton (1981a) and Adele Mercier (1995)):

We are, then, making a classificatory error if we claim that ‘man’ and ‘he’ are gender-neutral terms. In order to avoid such a classificatory error. Perhaps the meaning of ‘he’ that has been called ‘gender-neutral’ is not really gender-neutral, but something much more complex. Mercier suggests, for example, that we should understand the ‘gender-neutral’ use of ‘man’ as referring to either (a) a person or persons of unknown sex; or (b) males or a combination of males and females (never to a female or females alone).

But, on its own, this does not show that there is a problem with those uses that have traditionally been classified as gender-neutral, such as “Man is a primate”, or “each student should pick up his handout”. Further reasons why using “man” as a ‘gender-neutral’ term is wrong include:

1. Invisibility of Women

There is good psycholinguistic evidence that those who encounter sentences (such as ”each student should pick up his handout”) that use the terms ‘he’ and ‘man’ think more readily of males than of females. ^The use of these words can be seen as contributing to the invisibility of women.

Studies show that when women read a piece of writing that uses inclusive gender neutral language they internalise and understand the piece more than they do if the same piece is written using masculine ‘gender neutral’ language. Hence, whether something is written using masculine or inclusive language affects the message women receive when they read the piece.

2. Male as Norm

The use of these terms such as ”managress” and “lady doctor” seems premised on the idea that maleness is the norm, and that women filling these jobs are somehow deviant versions of doctors and managers. This is also a key objection to the use of ‘he’ and ‘man’. The use of terms like ‘he’ and ‘man’ as if they were gender-neutral perpetuates the objectionable idea that men are the norm for humanity.

The idea of male as norm gets extended even when masculine language is not being used, eg: the following sentence from the Sunday Star Times where the author slips from using the generic “they” to assuming that “they” are all men:  ”The lack of vitality is aggravated by the fact that there are so few able-bodied young adults about. They have all gone off to work or look for work, leaving behind the old, the disabled, the women and the children. (Cameron 1985: 85)”

 * Quiz: name any pair of male and female words in the English language where the female word is the root word. I will answer this shortly in a future post. There are many examples whee the male word is the root word (eg. actor/actress, steward/stewardess, master/mistress, waiter/waitress, comedian/ comedianne, testator/testatrix).