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My mother started as a first year student at the University of North Carolina in
1972.
That would not have been possible had she been born just a few years earlier.
For most of its history,
UNC was an exclusively male institution, like many universities.
And while we've come an incredible long way from there,
sexism is still alive and well.
Indeed, it's living in our language.
Now, I'm not talking about words that were designed to denigrate women.
Bitch, whore, slut.
I'm talking about seemingly innocent words, words that we hear every day.
Perhaps we even speak them.
Mankind.
Man made.
Or popular here at Stanford, Chairman.
Fellow.
Male centered words are everywhere.
We're taught that all men are created equal.
We man tables and
use our manpower to elect Congressmen who rule in man made institutions.
Man.
>> [LAUGH] >> We laugh, but I'm
really concerned with these associations due to our unconscious beliefs.
How does the perpetual association of male terms with power and with strength,
and female terms with insult and with weakness shape our expectations for
men and for women, our expectations of our self, or even our self worth?
Children can help us understand just how powerful language can be.
My niece, Ella, is five years old.
She has three older brothers, and I was babysitting for them.
And so I asked them what do you guys want to do tonight?
Ella was silent.
A little later as I was tucking her into bed she looked up at me and
she said Uncle Win, how come you only wanted to know what the guys wanted to do?
Why didn't you care about me?
My heart sank.
Of course, I wanted to hear what she had to say.
I love Ella's opinions.
Sometimes, I love Ella the most.
>> [LAUGH] >> I never meant to suggest
that she didn't matter, but that's exactly what I had done through my words.
And thank goodness she said something to me.
When I had said you guys to her, she took me literally.
And quite logically, she felt left out.
How often had she felt that way before?
How many of you have ever felt that way before, excluded by language,
even if you knew that that wasn't the speaker's intention?
Male-centered words are everywhere.
When you flip the words around,
how many men do you know that feel flattered to be called a woman?
Right?
Douglas Hofstetler is a philosopher.
And what he does is he replaces in a satire male-based generic words
with race-based ones.
Mankind becomes whitekind,
freshman becomes freshwhite, chairman becomes chairwhite.
And in this imaginary world, it becomes pretty ridiculous that we would ever
expect people of color to feel included by these terms, or that these terms wouldn't
have real and lasting consequences, things that reflect are pretty gruesome history.
But that's exactly what we do.
It's what we do to women, and it's what I did to Ella.
Of course, some women, and
many women do feel included by these terms, and that's entirely understandable.
Women who become congressmen for
example, work incredibly hard to get where they are.
They overcome enormous obstacles.
They earn the title.
When women don't feel included, I've heard them speak up and
then I've watched the eye rolls.
I've listened as they get labeled high maintenance,
overly sensitive, or much worse.
When we use female words to insult women,
we communicate a pretty disturbing message, and we communicate the same
disturbing message when we use only positive words with male terms.
Sociologist Sheryl Clyman explains that when you use
chairman for women, yes, a particular woman can become a chairman.
But women as a group cannot.
Chairman sets expectation that chairmen are men.
And when a woman achieves that title, she's merely an exception.
Never the rule.
Rarely the expectation.
When we use male based generics, we erase women linguistically.
Symbolically, annihilate them.
Now, there's a visionary who I love, Marilyn Frye, and she imagines all of
this gender inequity as essentially a birdcage that traps women inside.
There are many, many wires to the cage.
One wire is the wage gap.
Another wire is sexual harassment.
Another one is men's violence against women.
And there's sexist English.
The point here is that there are many, many wires.
And these wires, no wire by itself traps the bird inside.
It's all of the wires working together in combination that creates a prison.
We can break that prison.
With so many wires I often get asked why focus on language.
Aren't there other wires that are more important?
Let me be clear, every wire is important.
Every wire deserves to be broken and every wire that we break creates a new opening.
I like to single out sexist language for three reasons.
The first reason is that everyone has the power to break this wire.
It's entirely within our control.
Each of us decides constantly what words we're going to say,
what we're going to type in a text message, put in an email.
What language displays on our websites or
goes in a official publications that we put up there.
Language is a choice that we make constantly.
It's our choice.
The second reason is that we can break this wire right now,
you don't have to wait.
It's so
much easier to start saying you all today than it is to close the wage gap tomorrow.
Though, of course, we should do that, too.
The third reason is that gender inclusive language
is inclusive of everyone, even men.
It doesn't harm anyone when you switch to inclusive terms.
Instead, it proactively signals your commitment to women.
And what more powerful message to send.
I want to acknowledge that while this solution is really simple,
that doesn't make it easy.
Male dominated words are everywhere.
They're deeply embedded in our culture.
Getting rid of them requires intention, it requires unlearning.
It requires a community to hold one another accountable.
So let's do this together.
Let's stop using gendered words and replace them with gender neutral options.
Freshman becomes first year student.
Chairman becomes chair.
Arbuckle fellow becomes Arbuckle coach or scholar or leader.
You guys becomes you all.
Or if you're like me from the South, y'all.
>> [LAUGH] >> Language is a tool of thought.
It's a tool for building community, and it's a tool for breaking birdcages.
Each of us has the power to create the world that we want to be in.
So do we want a language that reflects our history of excluding and
diminishing women?
No.
Do we prefer a language that aspires towards something much more inclusive for
our future, for our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, our nieces?
Your decision to become a gender savvy speaker is a decision
to build this world, a world that takes women seriously.
Sheryl Clyman teaches that inclusive
language is the resource that each of us has at the tip of our tongues.
Let's start tasting its freedom today.
Thank you.
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