Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men(3)

Even human bones are not exempt from male-unless-otherwise-indicated thinking. We might think of human skeletons as being objectively either male or female and therefore exempt from male-default thinking. We would be wrong. For over a hundred years, a tenth-century Viking skeleton known as the ‘Birka warrior’ had – despite possessing an apparently female pelvis – been assumed to be male because it was buried alongside a full set of weapons and two sacrificed horses.11 These grave contents indicated that the occupant had been a warrior12 – and warrior meant male (archaeologists put the numerous references to female fighters in Viking lore down to ‘mythical embellishments’13). But although weapons apparently trump the pelvis when it comes to sex, they don’t trump DNA and in 2017 testing confirmed that these bones did indeed belong to a woman.

The argument didn’t, however, end there. It just shifted.14 The bones might have been mixed up; there might be other reasons a female body was buried with these items. Naysaying scholars might have a point on both counts (although based on the layout of the grave contents the original authors dismiss these criticisms). But the resistance is nevertheless revealing, particularly since male skeletons in similar circumstances ‘are not questioned in the same way’.15 Indeed, when archaeologists dig up grave sites, they nearly always find more males, which, as noted anthropologist Phillip Walker drily noted in a 1995 book chapter on sexing skulls, is ‘not consistent with what we know about the sex ratios of extant human populations’.16 And given Viking women could own property, could inherit and could become powerful merchants, is it so impossible that they could have fought too?17

After all, these are far from the only female warrior bones that have been discovered. ‘Battle-scarred skeletons of multiple women have been found across the Eurasian steppes from Bulgaria to Mongolia’ wrote Natalie Haynes in the Guardian.18 For people such as the ancient Scythians, who fought on horseback with bows and arrows, there was no innate male warrior advantage, and DNA testing of skeletons buried with weapons in more than 1,000 Scythian burial mounds from Ukraine to Central Asia have revealed that up to 37% of Scythian women and girls were active warriors.19

The extent to which male-unless-otherwise-indicated permeates our thinking may seem less surprising when you realise that it is also embedded in one of the most basic building blocks of society: language itself. Indeed, when Slocum criticised male bias in anthropology, she pointed out that this bias appeared ‘not only in the ways in which the scanty data are interpreted, but in the very language used’. The word ‘man’, she wrote, ‘is used in such an ambiguous fashion that it is impossible to decide whether it refers to males or to the human species in general’. This collapse in meaning led Slocum to suspect that ‘in the minds of many anthropologists, ‘man’, supposedly meaning the human species, is actually exactly synonymous with ‘males’. As we shall see, the evidence suggests that she was probably right.

In Muriel Rukeyser’s poem ‘Myth’, an old, blind Oedipus asks the Sphinx, ‘Why didn’t I recognize my mother?’ The Sphinx replies that Oedipus answered her question (what walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening) incorrectly. ‘[Y]ou answered, Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.’ But, replies Oedipus, when you say man, ‘you include women too. Everyone knows that.’

But in fact the Sphinx was right and Oedipus is wrong. When you say man you don’t ‘include women too’, even if everyone does technically ‘know that’. Numerous studies in a variety of languages over the past forty years have consistently found that what is called the ‘generic masculine’ (using words like ‘he’ in a gender-neutral way) is not in fact read generically.20 It is read overwhelmingly as male.

When the generic masculine is used people are more likely to recall famous men than famous women;21 to estimate a profession as male-dominated;22 to suggest male candidates for jobs and political appointments.23 Women are also less likely to apply, and less likely to perform well in interviews, for jobs that are advertised using the generic masculine.24 In fact the generic masculine is read so overwhelmingly as male that it even overrides otherwise powerful stereotypes, so that professions such as ‘beautician’, which are usually stereotyped female, are suddenly seen as male.25 It even distorts scientific studies, creating a kind of meta gender data gap: a 2015 paper looking at self-report bias in psychological studies found that the use of the generic masculine in questionnaires affected women’s responses, potentially distorting ‘the meaning of test scores’.26 The authors concluded that its use ‘may portray unreal differences between women and men, which would not appear in the gender-neutral form or in natural gender language versions of the same questionnaire’.

And yet in the face of decades of evidence that the generic masculine is anything but clear, official language policy in many countries continues to insist that it is purely a formality whose use must continue for the sake of . . . clarity. As recently as 2017, the Académie fran?aise, France’s ultimate authority on the French language, was thundering against ‘the aberration of “inclusive writing”’, claiming that ‘the French language finds itself in mortal danger’ from workarounds for the generic masculine. Other countries including Spain27 and Israel28 have faced similar rows.

Because English is not a grammatically gendered language, the generic masculine is fairly restricted in modern usage. Terms like ‘doctor’ and ‘poet’ used to be generic masculine (with specifically female doctors and poets referred to – usually derisively – as poetesses and doctoresses), but are now considered gender neutral. But while the formal use of the generic masculine only really clings on in the writings of pedants who still insist on using ‘he’ to mean ‘he or she’, it has made something of a comeback in the informal usage of Americanisms such as ‘dude’ and ‘guys’, and, in the UK, ‘lads’ as supposedly gender-neutral terms. A recent row in the UK also showed that, for some, male default still matters an awful lot: when in 2017 the first female head of London’s Fire Brigade, Dany Cotton, suggested that we should replace ‘fireman’ with the now standard (and let’s face it, much cooler) ‘firefighter’, she received a deluge of hate mail.29