(no subject)
Though intellectually well prepared for the idea, it remains odd and slightly shocking to to realize that I am as prone as anyone to assume the gender of a writer on the basis of their style, subject manner, surname, or other tacit cues. As in most people, this process usually occurs quite beneath my awareness and I usually have no (unphilosophic) reason to be concerned about it, but several times in last few days my culturally-tuned gender-sense has clearly misfired. Curiously, my mistake in each instance was to assume that the writer was a woman.
Such a shift of perspective is subtle yet jarring in any case, but these revelations have been particularly disorienting because several were authors that I have read extensively, either recently in great length or repeatedly over the years, and who occupy important and seemingly personal places in the disembodied community of references that form my conception of This Science.
It unfortunately remains the case that for a majority of academic publications, one is rarely mistaken in assuming that the writer is a man, so this could entirely be the result of a sampling bias. Either I have dwelt too long in the realm of biology, where the usual demographic trends are more equitable if not reversed, or I maybe I have been making this error all along and simply failed to notice.
While it may dispel the magic, I am going to start paying more attention to the gender I automatically assign to authors on the basis of their writing, deliberately ignoring their first names where I had been doing so accidentally before.
Such a shift of perspective is subtle yet jarring in any case, but these revelations have been particularly disorienting because several were authors that I have read extensively, either recently in great length or repeatedly over the years, and who occupy important and seemingly personal places in the disembodied community of references that form my conception of This Science.
It unfortunately remains the case that for a majority of academic publications, one is rarely mistaken in assuming that the writer is a man, so this could entirely be the result of a sampling bias. Either I have dwelt too long in the realm of biology, where the usual demographic trends are more equitable if not reversed, or I maybe I have been making this error all along and simply failed to notice.
While it may dispel the magic, I am going to start paying more attention to the gender I automatically assign to authors on the basis of their writing, deliberately ignoring their first names where I had been doing so accidentally before.