>To: womenbio at net.bio.net>From: ravena at cco.caltech.edu (Karen Allendoerfer)
>Subject: Re: language equity
>Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 07:57:38 -0800
>>In article <ebrown-2311962242340001 at jenkintown3.access1.dh.i-2000.net>,
>ebrown at i-2000.com (Ellie Brown) wrote:
>>> Last week I attended a joint meeting of AWIS (Association for Women in
>> Science) and SWE (Society for Women Engineers) where the discussion topic
>> was Gender Equity in the Classroom. One thread involved the perceived
>> meaning of words such as "mankind" or the generic pronoun "he". The women
>> in this group were generally between 30 and 60 years old, and almost all
>> said that they had always felt included by these terms.
>>Really? I never felt included by these terms.
>>Karen
>
This is a bit heavy, but I have to admit I never felt excluded by those terms, until I
was having a conversation with a friend in psychology working on women's issues about
adolecent dreams and realized that as a teenager, in many of my dreams in which I was
powerful, I saw myself as genderless. But in "regular dreams" I was female. I had no
cultural conditioning for a powerful woman (and considering how advanced my mother and
her career were and are, I have to blame it on the greater culture and not my
upbringing). So I go out of my way (yeah-I still say "guys" informally) to fix this.
When a fellow grad students says "A PI should run his lab such and such a way" I add
"or HER lab" and get looked at like I have 3 heads! But because many people
unconciously don't think of female when we say "he"-even if we don't mean "he" to be
exclusive, I think we need to say "she" often as well. I think it jars precisely
because we're not accustomed to it.
Julia Frugoli
Dartmouth College
visiting grad student at
Texas A&M University
Department of Biological Sciences
College Station, TX 77843
409-845-0663
FAX 409-847-8805
"Evil is best defined as militant ignorance."
Dr. M. Scott Peck
