The English language has two sets of pronouns for the third-person singular: he/him/his and she/her/hers. It is practically impossible to talk grammatically about individuals without implicitly mentioning their sex. While this can seem benign, it has several significant implications, which will be examined in this chapter.
When A mentions a person unknown to B (``my biology teacher''), B must find out whether the third person is male or female in order to know how to phrase questions (``How is he/she?''). If A does not provide the information, B will usually guess the default pronoun from what is known --- e.g. ``he'' for a professor, and ``she'' for a secretary. Most often, this is done subconsciously, showing the speaker's preconceptions. It seems reasonable to expect that when children hear their parents using their best guess for people discussed, they will subconsciously conclude that a man's being a scientist, for example, is normal, while a woman's being a scientist is unusual.
It is common for female scientists to be incorrectly addressed. They tend to consider these incidents humorous, and they trade horror stories:
[M]y favorite case in this regard occurred about two years ago, when I received a letter addressed to Mr. [Name], saying `Dear Mr. [Name]: I attended your presentation at the [A] Conference on [B]. Please send me copies of your related technical reports. Sincerely, Dr. X'Usually, my only response to such incorrect usage is to sign my return letter as Dr. [Name], but that one was too much for me to let slide unremarked. So I sent a reply as follows:
Dear Dr. X: While I am accustomed to receiving letters addressed to Mr. [Name] from colleagues who have never met nor seen me, I found your letter quite puzzling. You began by saying you attended my presentation at the [A] Conference on [B]. Surely you must have noticed that I am female! If this was a secretarial error, you might alert your secretary that female computer scientists exist and that in cases of doubt, ``Dr.'' is a genderless form that is unlikely to offend (and may in fact be correct). Sincerely, Dr. [Name].
I neither expected nor received a reply, but I felt better, and maybe I saved some other female computer scientist from one of those letters.
When I was applying for jobs, two of the computer science departments requested letters of recommendation for Mr. [Jane Linda Smith]. One almost immediately sent a followup letter, explaining that they were terribly sorry, that they indeed knew that [Jane Linda Smith] was female, and that they would certainly read the recommendation letters more carefully than they'd proofread their own request. The other department was the one in which I was then a graduate student.
Perhaps the most unusual story in this category is that of a woman who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the late seventies:
The scroll that [geneticist] Vivian [Davidson] received from the Academy had her name engraved on it, and then went on to announce that Vivian Davidson was being honored for `his' accomplishments, and that `he' was now entitled, and `he' could, and `he' should. She was so amazed at all the `he's that she sent a letter to the Academy inquiring whether the source of the problem might be that the engraver was British and had taken Vivian for a man's name, or was it perhaps that the printing process was lagging behind the process of election of women to the Academy. The letter she received back from the Academy secretary (a man) was an angry one informing her that she was the first person ever to complain, the scroll was an honor, its plate had been struck in 1868 [sic] by Abraham Lincoln, and it had a historic value the Academy was not about to tamper with.At the next Academy meeting in Washington, Vivian raised the matter of the scroll's wording with some of the other women scientists. Each one said she had never noticed the use of `he' instead of `she' on the scroll. `That's probably true,' Vivian said sadly. `They're so grateful to be allowed into the club, they wouldn't dream of making waves. In all likelihood they haven't noticed' [Gornick 1990, page 115,].
Also of interest are the experiences of a male professor whose first name is also a woman's name:
I think having that name has made me more sympathetic to problems women face, as in e-mail it is almost always assumed that I am a woman. That means I get a rash of mash notes from the Math/CS students when they first learn e-mail and pick my name out of the user list.... It also means that I get a great response every time I post a computer problem to a usenet group. Since I haven't done the control condition where I have a male's name, I'll never know for sure, but the tone of so many responses are so solicitous that I have to wonder (even followups to see if everything worked out okay). The worst case was in a scientific exchange through the mail where the other scientist was being exceedingly patronizing. It was only when he came to [X] for a convention and tacked on his room and phone number and invited me for a drink that it dawned on me that he thought he was corresponding with a woman. For me I can laugh about these occurrences (as well as the female roommates I routinely get assigned at meetings), but it would certainly be different if it never went away.