Holiday Homework

Intended audience; someone with limited specialist knowledge on language/gender theory.

Is the dictionary sexist?

The Oxford dictionary has said it will review the sentence example for ‘rabid’; which is defined as “irrationally extreme in opinion”, using the sentence example of a “Rabid Feminist”. The publisher of the dictionary was taken to task by Canadian anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan. He tweeted to the publisher of the dictionary, proposing that he consider changing it. Oman-Reagan, who is doing a PhD at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, also suggested that he reconsider adapting other “explicitly sexist examples” that had been included in the published copy of the dictionary. Other explicit sentence examples were used for the following words;

Ø  Shrill – “the rising shrill of women’s voices”

Ø  Psyche – “I will never find the Phantom the female psyche”

Ø  Grating – “Her high, grating voice”

Ø  Nagging – “nagging wife”

Ø  Housework – “She’s still doing the housework”

You would think that with the Oxford dictionary being a highly used and rated offspring of the Oxford University (which is currently the 2^nd best in the whole of the UK), wouldn’t be so sexist by exploiting women, using their stereotypical personas.  These people are supposed to be very highly educated, is this really the best that Britain has to offer in terms of intelligence? It stuns me that such a highly recognised university would allow this to be published, because the context is so narrow minded.

The tom foolery continues with the choice and use of pronouns that are used to describe Doctors and Nurses.  The occupational pronouns that are used for a Doctor or nurse, are gender neutral because they give no information about the gender of the person in question. We tend to expect that the doctor will be male and the nurse will be female due to stereotypes, there is no social sigma towards the fact there may be a female doctor or male nurse. However, what can cause a social stigma is the assumption that a particular gender wouldn’t be capable or would fit the role that would be typically played by the opposite gender. We can’t assume that the doctor was labelled as male, but from the other sexist examples that are used throughout we can infer strongly that the two are linked. If the examples had only been used once or twice they might have been acceptable, but the broadened meaning of sexism and stereotypes means that most people are likely to take offence.

The dictionary is a very permanent record, it is printed and published and distributed to thousands of school, colleges and universities over the country. Millions of people would have access to this source, not only this but children who are very impressionable in terms of learning, may start to believe that these sexist terms are acceptable. The archaic language used in this version of the dictionary, surely isn’t a true reflection of the society we live in today? It has been almost 2 centuries ago since Elizabeth Blackwell was allowed to complete medical school, as the first woman ever to become a qualified doctor. If children/young adults are lead to believe that there will be opposition or social stigma to them cry to establish a career that tends to be single sex dominated, they will be far less likely to even attempt to pursue it.

There are a few theories that can offer an explanation as to why the publisher has chosen such a conventional approach to the layout of the dictionary. Various theories such as Zimmerman and Wests’ theory of male dominance and Lakoffs’ deficit model although published almost 40 years ago, may offer an explanation as to why the sexist ideas have been used. Even though the research is out of date, quite limited with evidence and has been proven wrong by other linguists, but I will still use them because I have a suspicion that the publisher of the Oxford dictionary may have taken a few tips from these out dated linguists judging by the contents of the dictionary. The dominance model refers to interruptions in conversation, specifically identifying gender differences within language. Conclusions from their study, supported the “Dominance model” which implies that men and women speak diversely and not only this but there were tendencies from the males to disregard what the female was saying. This almost suggests that Women had nothing interesting or relevant to say, this shows the same kind of disregard for women as the publisher did. The research of the study was very limited, and only tested very few people in comparison to Beattie who replicated the study and found that the difference in number of interruptions and disregard for women’s speech was very much natural when a larger amount of people was studied. As for Lakoff’s theory there was no evidence whatsoever, it was simply assumptions based on her opinion. Her ideas were published and shared around the world. She believed the male language was more prestigious, desirable and stronger than women’s, or as the Oxford dictionary like to call it less ‘Grating’.

The Oxford dictionary is a perfect example of a source lost with time, it has failed to meet the expectations of the ever evolving world. Which takes small but sure steps to overcome gender equality, in society and communities which are stuck in archaic times. However, established and renowned a source may be there will always flaws. The main problem I have with the use of this dictionary is that in this day and age it still deems it acceptable to publically insult and exploit women, who with time have also evolved and become more and more independent. Don’t you think there needs to be a change?