Pictures, words and women

I taught the Mass Communication and Gender class this spring. It went really well. Students did some interesting projects and seemed to learn a lot. But when it comes to comm and gender, some people still have a lot to learn.

My son got a neat game for his sixth birthday. It's called "Guess Who," and he really enjoys playing it. I am troubled by it, though. The point of the game is to use guesses as clues to find out who your opponent is. The board features 24 faces. Five are female. This just doesn't seem right to me. About half the population is female. Children learn a lot by playing games. What are they to learn when only five out of 24 faces are female?

If you care about issues of fairness in communication, you should check out the writings of Kate Swift. Swift, who died in early May, did a lot of work on sexism in language. As she and her co-author Casey Miller wrote in Words and Women,

everything we read, heard on the radio and television, or worked on professionally confirmed our new awareness that the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.

Swift and Casey called attention to some of the blatantly sexist phrases in English and helped change the way words were used. For instance, they pointed out that when women were talked about, they were usually talked about in terms of their looks. The use of "firefighter" instead of "fireman" can be traced to their work. Read the New York Times obituary.