Examples of Usage in Transition

In an approximately one month period of observation, I was able to find many examples of people waffling on the issues of gender nonspecific language at and around the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. I consider ambivalence more revealing than conforming to the old ways, because it shows that many individuals are trying to grapple with the issues but are unable to do so in a consistent manner. These examples are presented not because the behavior was egregious but to show the conflict within individuals:

• A conference was held in one of the most male-dominated areas of computer science. Nevertheless, a few women played prominent technical roles. Relevant incidents were:
  1. A male attendee asked a female speaker: ``How many [pause] engineer-years did this take?'' His pause was not sarcastic; he evidently decided mid-sentence to use a neutral term instead of ``man-years''. One guesses he would have used the latter term if asking the question of a male.
  2. A female was introduced as a ``chairperson'' but, like the other (male) chairpeople, wore a ribbon that said ``chairman''.
• During a talk, a professor showed a slide which said ``he/she'' for the generic computer architect, but said ``he'' when speaking.
• An announcement was sent to members of the AI Lab, containing ``I am looking for a few brave men (or women) willing to help...''
• In a recent issue of a journal, a book reviewer referred to the prototypical researcher as ``he'', parenthetically adding ``typically he is a he''.

This is not progress, in my opinion. In fact, in some ways, it is retrograde motion, and damages the cause of nonsexist language. The problem is that these people are simultaneously showing that they recognize that ``he'' is not truly generic and yet continuing to use it as if it were. They are thereby, at one and the same time, increasing other people's recognition of the sham of considering ``he'' as a generic, and yet reinforcing the old convention of using it anyway. It's a bad bind [Hofstadter 1986, page 150,].