Showing posts with label gender neutral job titles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender neutral job titles. Show all posts

August 26 – National Webmistress Day

Posted on August 26, 2019

There has been, for quite a few decades now, a movement away from sexist and gender-specific job titles. For example, not every police officer is a policeman - but when I was a little kid, we'd only hear policeman-policeman-policeman all day long, and maybe once a year we'd hear "police woman" - and there would be a moment of shock as everyone absorbed the fact that women can help police our cities, too!


The change to "police officer" has been a good change. Andother job titles have changed to be more fair and inclusive. Firefighter, server, flight attendant, and supervisor are all more descriptive and inclusive than fireman, waitress, stewardess, and foreman.

Some job titles haven't needed a change - doctor, judge, senator, astronaut, and teacher are all examples - and some job titles are only now starting to change - like "actor" for women and non-binary people as well as for men. 

Isn't it strange to see how convoluted language was when, back in the day, people thought it so very important that a person's gender MUST be front and center? Like calling a pilot (or aviator) who happens to be a woman an "aviatrix"? Have you ever heard someone called an authoress or comedienne, a poetess or an usherette? All those words used to be used but were thankfully dropped for author, comedian, poet, and usher for people of any gender.


Well, today's holiday puts a gender-specific job title front and center! 

National Webmistress Day?

What's a webmistress?

Not that kind of web mistress!

Well, you have probably heard of a webmaster - It's the person who creates and/or maintains a particular website.

In other words, a web master is a web developer.

Notice that master was once a gendered word that was always associated with men and boys. The feminine version of the word master was mistress - and it may still be in some places, but for the most part, at least in the U.S., mistress has evolved to mean something other than "owner of the pet in question" or "female head of the household in question" or any other use of the respected title Mistress.

Let's go back to the word mastery - knowledge of a skill, accomplishment in an area, maybe even superiority of knowledge or accomplishment. If a girl is a master of disguise, she's really, really good at going undercover. If a man is a master thief, he's known for having way better skills than the average criminal. If a woman earns a Master's Degree in political science, that's evidence of quite a few classes and probably a thesis in that field. 

This is Russian chess
grandmaster Tatiana 
Anatolyevna Kosintseva.
A person who has mastery in a field - like website design or maintenance - can be called a master in that field. And that has nothing to do with the fact that a long-ago gentleman used to be called master of the house, or that a knight's son was addressed as Master So-and-so.

All of which begs the question: why-oh-why would the people who made this day call a female webmaster a webmistress?



This is one of those light (non-serious) uses of gendered language meant to raise our consciousness of our unrecognized assumptions and biases. If I talked about a webmaster of a company, and then a different webmaster of a school district, and then a third webmaster, this one working for the National Organization for Women...you might assume (without even knowing you were assuming) that all three webmasters were men. Even the one working for NOW!
 
Type "computer geek" or "hacker,"
"web master" or "web developer"
 into your web browser, and check out
the people in the images.

Mostly male?
In 2016, two-thirds of all web developers were male - which means that one third was female. It might be a little bit more even by now. With a majority (but not an overwhelming majority) of webmaster being men, some people assume that any given one is a man. But of course, those people would be wrong quite often. I gather that using the word-that-isn't-really-a-word webmistress, the holiday creators were trying to point out that an awful lot of webmasters are women!

So:

National WebMistress Day recognizes women in web development. We are urged to email a female web developer thanking her for a job well done, plus submitting positive reviews on social media, endorsing on LinkedIn, giving a shout-out on Facebook and Twitter, and liking and sharing her posts or pages.

And we're urged to use the hashtag #nationalWEBMISTRESSday ...









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July 18 – Actors' Birthdays (and, no, I don't mean "Actresses')

Posted on July 18, 2017

Today is the birthday of two of my favorite actors!

 Kristen Bell was born on this date in 1980 in Michigan. She is famous as the high-school-student-private-investigator Veronica Mars, as the voice of Princess Anna in Frozen, and as a woman experiencing a puzzling afterlife in The Good Place. Of course she's also done tons more acting projects as well and, in addition to being an actor, Bell is a singer.






Priyanka Chopra was born on this date in 1982 in Jamshedpur, India. 

She was considering studying aeronautical engineering or criminal psychology.

But after winning the Miss World beauty pageant in 2000, she got offers that involved stage and screen, and she ended up becoming an actor, singer, and film producer. 

Much of Chopra's work has been in India, in Bollywood, but since 2015 she has starred in an American network show - the first South Asian to do so.

Chopra is also known as a philanthropist - someone who does good things for others. She has worked with UNICEF and promotes causes about health, education, the environment, and women's rights. 



I hope you notice that I am not using the word actress. A lot of people, including Wikipedia and the Academy Awards, do still use the word actress, but we in English-speaking societies have been making language and job titles less and less sexist, and I think that we should continue to do so.

When I was a child, people used words like policeman and fireman, and nobody could imagine changing the terms to be less sexist. I mean, it was going to be so repetitive and long-winded to constantly say things like, "the policemen and policewomen of this great city"...right?

As you probably know, it wasn't actually that difficult. Once a few newspaper style guides and cities decided to take the plunge, it turned out that police officer and fire fighter were easy to say and accurate for males or females. Who knew?

Even stewardess has been replaced by flight attendant, from what I've seen. And most people use server instead of waiter or waitress.

SAG awards have category names
like "Outstanding Performance by
a Female Actor in a Leading Role."
Back in the day, people used to use comedienne for female comics and manageress for female managers. Even female authors were called authoresses, by many. Those days are long gone, and although many publication style guides dictate that writers and editors use actor for men and women unless writing about an award that still uses the word actress. I read that the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of TV and Radio Actors union uses actor for both male and female.

So, I am going to try to remember to do the same, from now on!

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