Instead of gender neutrality, try to go for gender balance? I use alternate “he” or “she”, and occasionally, semi-intentionally contradict myself [for example, in a talk about Bayes, I explained what I meant by “overconfidence” with an example—the specific numeric example used a name, Sally, and the general definition used “he”. For underconfidence, I used “Barry” and “she” respectively”. I believe Eliezer used to physically flip a coin for he vs. she.
I guess that’s fairer than switching (there might be an unfair on/off pattern), but would take me out of my writing flow, which is why the strict-alternation compromise is what I adopted.
Idea: every once in a while just flip a coin or otherwise generate a bunch of random bits. Save them and load up the file or get out the piece of paper you wrote the results down on or such when you’re ready to start writing. Then simply start peeling the bits off each time you need a new randomly assigned gender.
That doesn’t fix the “flow” issue. When I’m writing, the last thing I want to do is to be flipping through my files, looking for the bit file, etc. etc...
It still means I need to break my typing to look at an external stimulus. Honestly, so far I’ve not seen many instances where strict alternation worked badly, so I’m not motivated to solve this non-problem.
It would be better to flip a coin at the beginning of a document to determine which pronoun to use when the gender is unspecified. That way there is no potential for the reader to be confused by two different pronouns referring to the same abstract entity.
Or we could flip a coin once for all of the English-speaking world, so that we aren’t confused when we go from one document to another. Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
so that we aren’t confused when we go from one document to another
Why, on your view, would going from using “he” to refer to a hypothetical person in one document, to using “she” to refer to a different hypothetical person in a different document, be confusing?
(Not, mind you, that I intend to do this. I’ve been using the gender-neutral third-person plural pronoun consistently in these situations for years and see no reason to stop. )
Hypothetical people, or people of unknown gender, have no gender in reality I can refer to. If I have to treat them as gendered anyway, surely it is easier to have a default gender to fall back on, rather than having to keep track of the particular nonce gender of this particular hypothetical person/person of unknown gender.
For my part, if I’m being told a story about an actual person, whom I don’t know, who is referred to as “him” or “her,” I don’t find it especially confusing to subsequently keep track of their gender.
Nor do I find it significantly more confusing if they are hypothetical instead of actual.
I hadn’t previously realized there were people who differed from me in that regard. That’s useful to know: thanks for clarifying.
Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
I’d be very curious to see a study seeing if this did actually impact what gender people think of examples by default. Note that there have been studies showing that kids are more likely to think of a “fireman” as male than a “firefighter” and for similar roles, but I’m not aware of any such study for pronouns. I suspect you’d have the same result.
I’m not a statistically significant study, but given “The agent’s husband stood up from the table,” I would expect pretty much everyone to assume without much effort that the agent was female, but given “The agent led his husband onto the dance floor,” I’d expect most people to become confused, and some to assume a gay male agent, and very few to assume a female agent.
That suggests that the “his” gets treated as evidence of the referent’s masculinity strong enough to override a strong prior in the other direction.
My predisposition to assume that an agent is male is stronger than my predisposition to assume heteronormative relationships. My immediate reaction to the sentence, “The agent’s husband stood up from the table” was to suppose a male agent with a male spouse. But I’m probably unusual in this regard.
I mean, if you go “I am about to write, so I’ll load up the random male/female file right now” (though I admit, I haven’t tried this and it may very well also be disruptive to quickly tab to that file, check the next random gender and then delete it).
Oh well, if that doesn’t work, then… next idea then. (I don’t have the “next idea”, though, so you or someone else will have to come up with it. :))
Couldn’t you just default to “he” when writing, then when finished, flip a coin (or refer to whatever randomized gender generator you prefer), and go back and change the gender if need be? It wouldn’t interrupt the work flow; it would just be a little work after to revise.
Instead of gender neutrality, try to go for gender balance? I use alternate “he” or “she”, and occasionally, semi-intentionally contradict myself [for example, in a talk about Bayes, I explained what I meant by “overconfidence” with an example—the specific numeric example used a name, Sally, and the general definition used “he”. For underconfidence, I used “Barry” and “she” respectively”. I believe Eliezer used to physically flip a coin for he vs. she.
Eliezer still does.
I guess that’s fairer than switching (there might be an unfair on/off pattern), but would take me out of my writing flow, which is why the strict-alternation compromise is what I adopted.
Idea: every once in a while just flip a coin or otherwise generate a bunch of random bits. Save them and load up the file or get out the piece of paper you wrote the results down on or such when you’re ready to start writing. Then simply start peeling the bits off each time you need a new randomly assigned gender.
That doesn’t fix the “flow” issue. When I’m writing, the last thing I want to do is to be flipping through my files, looking for the bit file, etc. etc...
Could you use whether the minute on your clock is odd or even?
It still means I need to break my typing to look at an external stimulus. Honestly, so far I’ve not seen many instances where strict alternation worked badly, so I’m not motivated to solve this non-problem.
It would be better to flip a coin at the beginning of a document to determine which pronoun to use when the gender is unspecified. That way there is no potential for the reader to be confused by two different pronouns referring to the same abstract entity.
Or we could flip a coin once for all of the English-speaking world, so that we aren’t confused when we go from one document to another. Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
Why, on your view, would going from using “he” to refer to a hypothetical person in one document, to using “she” to refer to a different hypothetical person in a different document, be confusing?
(Not, mind you, that I intend to do this. I’ve been using the gender-neutral third-person plural pronoun consistently in these situations for years and see no reason to stop. )
Hypothetical people, or people of unknown gender, have no gender in reality I can refer to. If I have to treat them as gendered anyway, surely it is easier to have a default gender to fall back on, rather than having to keep track of the particular nonce gender of this particular hypothetical person/person of unknown gender.
Interesting.
For my part, if I’m being told a story about an actual person, whom I don’t know, who is referred to as “him” or “her,” I don’t find it especially confusing to subsequently keep track of their gender.
Nor do I find it significantly more confusing if they are hypothetical instead of actual.
I hadn’t previously realized there were people who differed from me in that regard. That’s useful to know: thanks for clarifying.
I’d be very curious to see a study seeing if this did actually impact what gender people think of examples by default. Note that there have been studies showing that kids are more likely to think of a “fireman” as male than a “firefighter” and for similar roles, but I’m not aware of any such study for pronouns. I suspect you’d have the same result.
I’m not a statistically significant study, but given “The agent’s husband stood up from the table,” I would expect pretty much everyone to assume without much effort that the agent was female, but given “The agent led his husband onto the dance floor,” I’d expect most people to become confused, and some to assume a gay male agent, and very few to assume a female agent.
That suggests that the “his” gets treated as evidence of the referent’s masculinity strong enough to override a strong prior in the other direction.
My predisposition to assume that an agent is male is stronger than my predisposition to assume heteronormative relationships. My immediate reaction to the sentence, “The agent’s husband stood up from the table” was to suppose a male agent with a male spouse. But I’m probably unusual in this regard.
I agree with your analysis but I’d like to see some form of formal study confirm it.
I mean, if you go “I am about to write, so I’ll load up the random male/female file right now” (though I admit, I haven’t tried this and it may very well also be disruptive to quickly tab to that file, check the next random gender and then delete it).
Oh well, if that doesn’t work, then… next idea then. (I don’t have the “next idea”, though, so you or someone else will have to come up with it. :))
Couldn’t you just default to “he” when writing, then when finished, flip a coin (or refer to whatever randomized gender generator you prefer), and go back and change the gender if need be? It wouldn’t interrupt the work flow; it would just be a little work after to revise.