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Gender-neutral writing: The pronoun problem
For most of us reared in the 1970s and 1980s, with Ms. magazine, All in the Family reruns and the spread of political correctness, gender-neutral writing is a no-brainer. We don’t automatically refer to people as he and him, and we usually opt for gender-inclusive terms like police officer instead of policeman. Same goes for our younger colleagues. But those schooled in earlier decades learned different lessons. What’s more, all of us, regardless of age, are influenced by the traditional approaches to English grammar and vocabulary that we encounter in material written before sexist language was on the radar (or before there even was radar). No matter what your field, your workplace writing has to be free from gender bias and stereotyping to be viewed as credible and professional. This article, one of two on gender-neutral writing, focuses on the grammatical side of the issue. Working around the pronoun gap Loving English is like loving your family: you have to accept a lot of flaws and peculiarities. One of the most enduring is the lack of a gender-inclusive singular pronoun that can complete a sentence like this: Each writer should develop own techniques for avoiding bias in writing. We have he and she, which are singular but gender-specific; we have it, which is singular but not used for people (at least not in polite discourse); and we have they, which is gender-inclusive but plural. That leaves us with … nothing. There is no singular personal pronoun that encompasses both genders, and attempts to introduce one (among the hopefuls: thon, hes, zhe, hu) have fizzled as fast as the average infomercial diet. English writers, being nothing if not resourceful, have developed a number of workarounds for sentences like the one above. The norm until the final quarter of the twentieth century was to use his, but because of the sexism inherent in preferring the masculine, that approach is now shunned. Use a plural antecedent. Individual writers should develop their own techniques for avoiding bias in writing. Eliminate the pronoun. Each writer should develop techniques for avoiding bias in writing. Each writer should develop some favourite [personal, individual, preferred, etc.] techniques for avoiding bias in writing. Switch to first person, second person or imperative. We should develop our own techniques for avoiding bias in writing. You should develop your own techniques for avoiding bias in writing. Work to develop your own techniques for avoiding bias in writing. Use his or her (when nothing else works, and if the result isn’t too awkward). Each writer should develop his or her own techniques for avoiding bias in writing. The singular they Absent from the list above is the option exercised most frequently by English speakers, and increasingly by English writers, though some still fret over the matter: Each writer should develop their own tools for avoiding bias in writing. It would be easy to write articles (plural), if not treatises (plural), about the history and acceptability of using they (and related pronouns them, their, theirs, themselves) to refer to singular antecedents. Here’s the Twitter version: The singular they is fine in speech; It’s equally fine in general writing; BUT It’s still avoided by some, especially in formal writing. In the "singular they" war, the antagonists used to divide into the permissive linguists and usage gurus on one side, and the traditionalist grammarians and copy editors on the other. No more. Editorially conservative publications like the Washington Post have accepted the singular they, which was voted 2015 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. Nowadays, even persnickety editors and language professionals are fine with the construction if it sounds natural, if no other approaches work well and if it’s a way of avoiding the clunky he or she. Here’s a rundown of where some current sources stand on using the singular they (ST) in formal writing. In favour Copyediting newsletter (“Singular They, Them, Their, and …” and articles linked to therein, https://www.copyediting.com/singular-they-them-their-and/): This well-respected publication and website for U.S. copy editors notes that ST has reached a tipping point in its acceptability. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (4th ed., 2015): Approves ST with few apologies or caveats, citing Oxford English Dictionary, which tracks ST from sixteenth century on. Says of ST: “The process now seems irreversible.” Justice Canada ("Gender-neutral language," http://canada.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/legis-redact/legistics/p1p...): Presents ST as first option for dealing with troublesome agreement like that in the sentence above. Law Society of British Columbia ("Respectful Language Guideline," Appendix A, https://www.lawsociety.bc.ca/page.cfm?cid=1005&t=Respectful-Language-Gui...): Finds ST most acceptable when used with "gender-indefinite antecedents" such as any, each, every, and with singular indefinite pronouns such as anyone, everybody, nobody, someone. Against Practical Grammar: A Canadian Writer’s Resource (3rd ed., 2014): Presents ST as an error in formal English. The Chicago Manual of Style: Recommended ST in 14th edition but recanted in 15th and now 16th editions, which both say ST is considered unacceptable in formal writing. (It can’t be coincidental that the relevant sections of both recent editions were written by Bryan Garner; see "Wishy-washy" below.) Yahoo! Style Guide ("Write gender-neutral copy," https://shopping.yahoo.com/9780312569846-yahoo-style-guide/): Calls ST "a grammatically controversial usage that could provoke criticism." Suggests avoiding it by using other tactics. Wishy-washy Canadian Press Stylebook (17th ed., 2013): Under "Sexism" advises rewording to avoid his or her and adds: "As a last resort, they (them, their) is an increasingly acceptable alternative to he (him, his)." For or against? It’s hard to tell. Editing Canadian English (3rd ed., 2015): Acknowledges that ST has always existed in informal speech and notes its use in informal writing “as a way to circumvent using he or she . . . ” The descriptor “informal” suggests unease about accepting the practice in formal writing. Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed., 2016): Says in "Sexism" that ST promises to become the ultimate solution to the agreement and gender problem. But then warns in "Concord" (B) that the lack of agreement is a "seeming sloppiness" that should be used "cautiously because some people may doubt your literacy." Throws up hands in "Pronouns" (D): "Disturbing though these developments [in using the ST] may be to purists, they’re irreversible. And nothing that a grammarian says will change them." Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage (2nd ed., 2007): In entry for everyone, everybody suggests, through overall tone and emphasis on ST’s history pre–eighteenth century, that the practice is okay. But says that most usage guides "evade the question of what to do in formal writing"—as does this guide itself. Some thoughts from your author I spent my first twenty years as a copy editor and grammar instructor avoiding the singular they and counselling against it in formal writing. Now I’m a convert. For one thing, many of my clients have shifted to more conversational writing, especially for their online material, and the singular they suits their tone. Further, I agree with Fowler’s and Garner’s that the trend toward the construction is irreversible, and I’m willing to change with the times. But I’m willing not because it’s easier to cave than to stand strong (I will never swallow the ungrammatical "feeling badly," for instance) but because there are sound arguments to consider. One involves the history of the usage. In a concise and readable account in the New York Times Magazine (July 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-t.html), Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman explain that for centuries the universal English pronoun for singular and plural, masculine and feminine, was they. Then along came Anne Fisher (yes, a woman), who in her 1745 grammar book prescribed he as the pronoun of choice to agree with singular indefinite pronouns. Suddenly a practice that had been natural and accepted, embraced by authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare (and later Austen), was smeared. Viewed this way, the singular they may be an "error" in the same way that the split infinitive or the sentence-ending preposition was, until half a century ago, an error: early grammarians labelled it as such with little heed for natural English. Another argument is that we, in western society at least, are questioning the notion of gender as binary. If individuals don’t identify with being a she or a he, what are we to do—deny those people a pronoun? Of course not. They is an elegant choice. A final argument, one I’ve not yet encountered outside my own mind, concerns the similarity between singular indefinite pronouns (e.g., everyone, somebody) and collective nouns (e.g., team, committee, department). It’s a contradictory yet undisputed point of grammar that collective nouns are treated as singular when their meaning is singular and plural when their meaning is plural: This class is designed for people at the beginner and intermediate levels. It is not suitable for experienced distance runners. (class is singular) The class have wasted two hours arguing over the characteristics of proper footwear. They simply cannot agree. (class is plural) I can’t help but wonder: if collective nouns can change their number according to their meaning, why can’t indefinite pronouns, such as everyone? Like collective nouns, these indefinites convey the sense of more than one, which is why treating them as singular seems unnatural if not illogical. English has other indefinite pronouns that can be either singular or plural according to meaning (e.g., all, any, some, more, most). In fact, in recent decades we’ve seen the once singular none slide into this "sometimes singular, sometimes plural" category. If it can change, why not the other indefinites? That’s my modest proposal for balancing the twin imperatives of grammatical integrity and gender neutrality. Related quiz Test yourself—Gender-neutral writing: The pronoun problemSource: Peck’s English Pointers (articles and exercises on the English language)
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Gender-neutral writing: Questions of usage
Read up on gender-neutral English and you’re bound to run into the history of the word man. Briefly, it goes like this. In Old English man meant a human being, male or female. The sex-differentiated terms were wer and wif, for males and females respectively. Around the late thirteenth century, wer fell out of use (though as horror fans know, we kept werewolf) and man took its place. Thus, for a time man carried two meanings: the newer one (male human beings) and the older one (all human beings). Now the newer meaning is the predominant one. Critics of gender-neutral usage—those for whom the prospect of changing workman to worker is a needless if not infuriating restriction of personal freedom, in a league with obeying "no smoking" signs or yielding to pedestrians—love this history. They will trot out the dual-sex meaning of man to defend all manner of gender-biased terms, including businessman, fireman, mailman, mankind. Such terms don’t refer exclusively to men, the critics say; they refer to both sexes, because that’s what man used to mean. Comforting as this argument may be to some, it skips over the fact that in our time the male meaning of man outweighs any other. As Editing Canadian English (2nd ed., 2000) notes: "Research has confirmed what was long suspected: when they hear or read the generic man, people form mental pictures of males." Anyone who doubts this should consider this oft-cited (though fictitious) title of a medical paper: "Development of the uterus in rats, guinea pigs, and men." To sidestep the perceived bias, not to mention lack of logic, that results from referring to people as men in modern English, government bodies, companies, publishers and academic institutions have made gender-neutral vocabulary a requirement. Putting that requirement into practice means knowing which words to replace and which to leave alone. Test yourself To measure your GQ (gender quotient), decide which of the following words you would change, in most circumstances, to a gender-neutral alternative. Answer yes, no or iffy. chairman man-made manufactured midwife actress dude manpower manslaughter Mrs. fisherman Iffy. When referring to the position in the abstract, use the gender-neutral chair or chairperson. But if you know and want to specify the sex of the person holding the position, chairman or chairwoman may be fine. Above all, respect the official job title if there is one: if an organization elects a Chair of the Board, consistently refer to that person as chair. Yes. There are many synonyms that allow for the possibility that a woman had a hand in making the thing. Try fabricated, machine-made, artificial, factory-produced, synthetic. No. Don’t assume that all terms that contain man derive from the word man. Words such as manufacture, manipulate, manual and manuscript come from manus, the Latin for "hand" (making manufactured another option for man-made in question 2). No. Midwife is a Middle English combination of the Old English mid (with) and wif (woman). It means a person of either sex who is with a woman giving birth. Iffy. Actress is a feminine form of actor; actor refers to either sex. Many feminine forms, including authoress, poetess and aviatrix, have exited current English, but actress is one of a few to hang on. For how much longer? One Los Angeles Times article says that "over the last decade or so, most thespians of the female persuasion now refer to themselves as actors, not actresses" (see http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/18/entertainment/ca-actress18). Still, we need only look at acting awards to see how divided the usage is. The Screen Actors Guild Awards honour the best male actor and best female actor, while the Oscars go to best actors and actresses. No. For teens and 20-somethings, dude has become the unisex equivalent of guy (as in you guys, which we older dudes use for males, females or both). Says a University of Pittsburgh professor who has tracked the word, "Dude is used mostly by young men to address other young men; however, its use has expanded so that it is now used as a general address term for a group (same or mixed gender), and by and to women" (http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/dude/dude.pdf). This gender-inclusivity is confirmed by a later study, entitled "Dude, Katie! Your dress is so cute: why dude became an exclamation," by Muffy Siegel, and no, I am not making that up (see https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Dude,+Katie!+Your+dress+is+so+cute%3A+why...). Yes. Like man-made, this word has many gender-neutral synonyms, among them labour, staff, human resources, workers, personnel, workforce. No. There is no synonym for manslaughter, a category of homicide that comes with a specific legal definition and a complex history of judicial precedent. Any attempt to create a gender-neutral synonym would distort meaning and sacrifice correctness and clarity. Similar words for which we have no reasonable synonyms, and which we should therefore leave alone, are manhole, defenceman and craftsmanship. Iffy. Because the traditional titles Mrs. and Miss indicate marital status, they are not equivalent to Mr., which is silent on whether a man has said "I do." The default honorific for women has therefore become Ms. This blend of Miss and Mrs., until recently thought to have originated in 1949, has now been traced back to a 1901 Massachusetts newspaper article that proposed it as a title that disregarded marital state (see http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/hunting-the-elusive-first-ms/). Still, as ubiquitous as Ms. has become, there are women who prefer to be called Mrs. or Miss. So how do you handle women’s titles? If the individual has indicated a preference, then respect it; otherwise, use Ms. And don’t assume that Mrs. is acceptable for any female who is married. There are many happily wedded women (your author included) who would no more call themselves Mrs. than they would wear a whalebone corset. Iffy. Who’d have pegged the rugged world of fisheries as the crucible for gender-neutral language in Canada? Yet that’s what it became in the late 1990s, when federal efforts to replace fisherman with fisher in government documents, coupled with a high-profile Supreme Court decision on native fishing rights, caused a riptide of dissent over what to call people who fish. To complicate matters, many women in the industry resented having their job title changed and insisted on being called fishermen. The "Fissure over Fisher," as it was called in an article on the CBC treatment of the issue (http://www.cbc.ca/news2/indepth/words/fishermen), has since narrowed but not closed. On one side is the government approach: fish harvester is now the official term for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (confirmed in an email to me from the department’s Communications Branch, June 21, 2013). On the other side is general publishing: The Canadian Press Stylebook (16th ed., 2010) states under "Sexism" that "there is not an entirely satisfactory substitute for fisherman, although fisher, fish harvester, fish industry worker, fishing licensees or the phrase fishermen and women are all possibilities"; the Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage (2nd ed., 2007), in its entry on job titles, singles out fisher as a term that has yet to gain wide acceptance. Even this brief test shows that stamping out gender bias can be tricky. As always, it’s a question of bearing in mind audience, message and clarity, those familiar ingredients of good writing. And as always, it’s a question of having reliable resources. One I can recommend is the Law Society of British Columbia’s "Respectful Language Guideline" (https://www.lawsociety.bc.ca/page.cfm?cid=1005&t=Respectful-Language-Gui...). In particular, check out Appendix A ("Gender-Neutral Language") for a list of terms to avoid and their gender-neutral substitutes. Related quiz Test yourself—Gender-neutral writing: Questions of usageSource: Peck’s English Pointers (articles and exercises on the English language)
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English then and now
Note: This article was written in 2008 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Translation Bureau publication Language Update. In 1968, when Language Update made its debut, I was not yet a writer and editor. I was three. According to my mother, I ran endless laps inside the house and devised new schemes for parting my brother from his candy. Otherwise, not much was happening in my world. I didn’t pose for digital photos in an era when digital conjured up images of thumb-sucking. There were no compact discs to listen to. No one ate pizza pockets or drank soft drinks sweetened with aspartame. There was no googling or faxing, no bungee jumping or break dancing. No one worried about global warming or saved up for a time-share. Lives were arguably simpler, vocabularies indisputably smaller. There’s no question—the English language has changed tremendously in the past four decades. New words, and new uses of old words, have sprung up to match developments in technology, science, economics and culture. But the fundamentals of the language—the rules of grammar and punctuation, the principles of clear style—have changed surprisingly little. Changes in grammar What’s striking about grammar rules from forty years ago is how similar they are to today’s. The guidelines for subject-verb agreement, pronoun case, modifier placement and verb tense are virtually unchanged. Many of the old rules that we now see as outdated (and that persist as grammar myths) had already toppled by 1968. Take none, for instance. Once considered singular, none was accepted forty years ago as a plural when used in a plural sense ("None of the applicants are qualified"). The second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1965) pulled no punches: "It is a mistake to suppose that the pronoun is singular only and must at all costs be followed by singular verbs, etc.; the Oxford English Dictionary explicitly states that plural construction is commoner." Similarly, rules drummed into earlier generations of pupils, like "don’t split an infinitive" and "don’t end a sentence with a preposition," had gone by the wayside. Eric Partridge, in the sixth edition of Usage and Abusage (1965), noted that we should avoid the split infinitive wherever possible, "but if it is the clearest and the most natural construction, use it boldly. The angels are on our side." (A different celestial phenomenon has been on our side since 1966, when the original Star Trek series aired with its now-famous "to boldly go." Interestingly, Partridge’s choice of boldly in rallying for the split infinitive predated Star Trek by one year.) Grammarians of the day were also pooh-poohing the old prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition. G. F. Lamb, in his textbook English for General Certificate (1964), brushed it off entirely: "The so-called ‘rule’ that we must not end a sentence with a preposition cannot be justified in English, and is not observed by any good writer." Fowler’s, in a virtual novella on the subject, concluded that the rule had become "a cherished superstition." The only real change in grammar since the late 1960s comes in an area that overlaps with usage and that, like usage, has been influenced by larger forces of society and culture. I’m referring to agreement between a pronoun and a singular antecedent like "everyone" or "each person." The rule back then was simple: use the masculine singular pronoun ("Everyone must bring his own wine to the party"). Since then feminism has outed the sexism implicit in that choice and has put the old practice to rest. But we’ve been left with a void, one that has produced lots of rewriting ("People must bring their own wine") and lots of debate about the ungainly his or her versus the (to some) ungrammatical their. This last option is gaining ground fast and will likely win the day, though for the moment authorities are still bickering. Changes in punctuation There was a time when English writing was scattered (some might say infested) with commas, but that time was not forty years ago. The trend toward cleaner, streamlined sentences was already afoot. Said G. F. Lamb: "The modern tendency is to omit the comma in many instances where earlier generations would have used it." The comma rules in his 1964 grammar book are indistinguishable from ours today. Likewise, what we think of as the new practice of adding "-’s" to names that end with "s" (Keats’s poetry, Charles’s hot tub) was already well established. In fact, it was the very first rule listed in the first and second editions (1959 and 1972) of The Elements of Style, Strunk and White’s now famous little book. Our desire for clean prose is undoubtedly behind the one change that has affected punctuation. Four decades ago periods were used with all abbreviations. Today they have disappeared from acronyms and initialisms (e.g., NATO, DVD, RRSP), perhaps because in our time these forms are so commonplace that we regard them more as words than as true abbreviations. Changes in style When I was three, I knew a thing or two about plain language, though in 1968 what that meant was stern lectures laced with the few mild swear words our Catholic household would allow. Plain language as a stylistic movement took off only in the 1980s. It gathered steam through the 1990s and is now a well-established force in the communications world. Yet the principles of composition listed in Strunk and White’s first and second editions of The Elements of Style read like the contents of a plain language primer: Choose a suitable design and hold to it Use the active voice Put statements in positive form Use definite, specific, concrete language Omit needless words Keep related words together Clear, concise, accessible style was as much an objective in 1968 as in 2008. The techniques for producing that style were just as simple to list . . . and just as difficult to execute. Changes in usage That leaves usage as the only hotbed of change in the past forty years. This isn’t surprising. As John Steinbeck put it, "A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator." It’s impossible to sum up the usage changes of the past four decades; to do so would require a book—no, books. Instead, here’s a random sampling of usages that were argued, shot down and trampled forty years ago but that have since become accepted, some with little fanfare, others with the kind of muttering acceptance that follows a battle reluctantly conceded. Who today would argue with the following sentence? We hope to contact a high-calibre translator, someone who can be trusted to finalize the translation with speed and hopefully with care. Four decades ago the italicized words were all under siege. Contact as a verb was inching its way toward acceptance, a point the 1965 Fowler’s haltingly conceded. But in 1972 Strunk and White still condemned the word as "vague and self-important. Do not contact anybody; get in touch with him, or look him up, or phone him . . . ." (Notice the outdated use of the masculine him to refer to anybody.) Calibre, in the sense of "order of merit or quality," riled up Eric Partridge, who wrote (no doubt with pursed lips) that expressions like high-calibre and low-calibre "are not absolutely wrong: they are merely ludicrous." Verbs ending in "-ize," the handiest suffix for verbifying, stir up their fair share of rancour—understandably, since most are neologisms for a time. Finalize was slammed in the 1960s, especially in British English, and has met with only slow acceptance, perhaps because it first appeared in Australia and the United States, those upstart colonies. Today, however, the New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (3rd ed., 1996) notes that "only elderly eyebrows are now raised when the word is used . . . ." That brings us to hopefully. Its use as a sentence adverb, as in the sample sentence above—unlike its fully accepted role as a run-of-the-mill adverb, to describe doing something in a hopeful manner (to gaze hopefully at someone)—was one of the most widely disputed, ardently fought usage points in the past four decades. In the entry for "sentence adverb," the New Fowler’s gives a juicy account of hopefully, calling it "one of the most bitterly contested of all the linguistic battles fought out in the last decades of the 20c." The carnage came in the late 1960s. Oddly, up to then sentence adverbs (like oddly here, plus frankly, actually, thankfully, strictly and the like) had proliferated without much criticism, but for some reason hopefully drew attack. It was as if every suspicion of change during that turbulent decade, every fear of the masses taking over power and culture and language, was concentrated in one annihilating beam trained on this harmless, optimistic word. The war over hopefully is done, say current authorities, and the sentence adverb is here to stay. But this word’s journey is only a slightly exaggerated version of what happens every time a point of language shifts. Condemnation, then debate, then tolerance, then acceptance—these are the stages that flow from our paradoxical need to keep language on the leash of standards while allowing it the freedom to roam.Source: Peck’s English Pointers (articles and exercises on the English language)
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Test yourself—Gender-neutral writing: Questions of usage
Is the sentence correct or does it contain a gender neutrality problem? Read the article Gender-neutral writing: Questions of usage to help you out.1. We offer free delivery within a 25-kilometre radius of the store. Our friendly, professional delivery men will unload your new furniture items and place them where you want them.is correcthas a problem2. The fickle heiress spent money lavishly on whoever was her best friend in a given week.is correcthas a problem3. The president of the parent-teacher association tried to manoeuvre her way into every meeting of the school board trustees, even the in camera sessions.is correcthas a problem4. Considered for over a decade to be the model of an English gentleman, Edgar Smythe-Jones saw his reputation crumble when he got drunk aboard a trans-Atlantic flight and made a pass at a stewardess.is correcthas a problem5. Our patented lawn blower reduces the personpower involved in clearing yards and driveways, and consumes a fraction of the electricity of other leading models.is correcthas a problem6. Though she has been widowed for over a decade, Mrs. Boronski can be spotted on her porch each morning with two cups of tea, one for herself and one for her long-mourned husband.is correcthas a problem7. Whenever he visits the Weeping Willow Inn, Marc orders the house ale and the ploughman’s lunch.is correcthas a problemSource: Peck’s English Pointers (articles and exercises on the English language)
Number of views: 1,387
Test yourself—Gender-neutral writing: The pronoun problem
Is the sentence correct or does it contain a gender neutrality problem? (Assume formal writing.) Read the article Gender-neutral writing: The pronoun problem to help you out.1. Earl and Jeffrey decided to rent tuxes, since each wanted to look his best for the prom.is correcthas a problem2. Every first-year student entering the polytechnic university must write the mathematics aptitude test before choosing his science courses.is correcthas a problem3. If you are thinking of hiring a teenager to babysit, we recommend that you check whether she has completed our babysitter training course.is correcthas a problem4. All first-year students entering the polytechnic university must write the mathematics aptitude test before choosing their science courses.is correcthas a problem5. To save on rental fees, the company is asking everyone to bring their own lawn chair and wineglass to the staff picnic.is correcthas a problem6. Settling into her chair, the storyteller began to recount the horrifying tale of the 1917 Halifax explosion.is correcthas a problemSource: Peck’s English Pointers (articles and exercises on the English language)
Number of views: 1,305