Dear Earthling,
When I was a little girl, I kept telling my mother that I wanted to be a king when I grew up. She gave me the same reply every time: You’re a girl, you have to be a queen. The conversation always ended the same way, until one day I settled things by saying I wanted to be a “woman king.”
My logic? Kings had all the power and queens had none. And my tyrannical toddler self wanted power.
It’s funny how these ideas wend their way into our worldview at such a young age. In all the Disney movies I watched when I was growing up, there was never a queen to be found. Sure, there were a lot of female heroes, but all of them princesses whose happy ending almost always required a prince charming to help wrest back control over their kingdom.
As a woman, I’m fully aware that gender inequality isn’t just the province of fiction. It is reflected in every aspect of society. What people expect from us (think: career vs. motherhood), what professional roles we can take on, how we are treated in the workplace, and so on. Even the language we speak tends to be gender biased.
But this is slowly changing. Gender-specific nouns in English are now often considered inappropriate or even sexist. Waiters and waitresses have become servers. Stewards and stewardesses are now flight attendants. And policemen and policewomen are now just police officers.
I’m a feminist myself, but I’m also a writer with OCD when it comes to language. So this week, for the Unbabel blog, I wrote a piece about whether language should be more gender neutral.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Do efforts to eliminate grammatical gender really help advance the movement for women’s equality? How do you think we can achieve gender equality and what are you doing to empower the women in your life?
Let me know!
Yaaaassss queen,
Maria
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“If you change the way people speak, you change what other people hear.”
Will efforts to eliminate grammatical gender advance the movement for women’s equality? Does the language we speak promote sexist views? Should we consciously change it? And would a change in language improve women’s status in society? Is it worth the trouble?
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Elliott-McCrea, a former architect at Flickr and co-author of the OAuth spec, is now the CTO at Etsy, the world's most vibrant handmade marketplace. During his tenure, he’s played a critical role in the company’s restructuring of its engineering organization. Now Etsy hires for diversity, particularly gender diversity. After witnessing firsthand how challenging it can be to attract women engineers, Elliott-McCrea shares lessons in building a process and culture to attract female engineers.
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Great customer experience is not about pretty packaging or free shipping — it’s about making the buyer feel understood, it’s about the ability of each individual within the organization to put themselves in the customers’ shoes, create a process that adapts to their needs, and deliver services and conversations that are meaningful to them. Restructuring your sales process around your customer may not seem like a priority, but it can ultimately lead to happier customers, increased revenue, and cross-team collaboration.
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HappyOrNot was founded just eight years ago, but its terminals have already been installed in more than a hundred countries and have registered more than six hundred million responses - significant accomplishments for a still tiny enterprise whose leaders say that their ultimate goal is to change not just the way people think about customer satisfaction but also the way they think about happiness itself.
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According to the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Report, only 22% of Artificial Intelligence (AI) professionals globally are female compared to 78% who are male. That finding is alarming in itself, but it is even more alarming in light of the rapid rate of technological change that we are experiencing today.
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💡 Speaking words of wisdom
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Who run the world? Girls!
— Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
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