Colin Baker, the body into whom the Peter Davison doctor had morphed, disagreed with his predecessor. Boys have ‘had fifty years of having a role model’, he argued. And in any case, he mused, do you have to be the same gender as someone to be a role model? ‘Can’t you be a role model as people?’ Not really, Colin, because as we’ve seen, ‘people’ tends to be read as male. And in any case, while there is evidence that women can to a certain extent accept men as role models, men won’t do the same for women. Women will buy books by and about men, but men won’t buy books by and about women (or at least not many).68 When adventure video game series Assassin’s Creed announced in 2014 that it would not be possible to play as a female assassin in their new cooperative multiplayer mode, some male players were pleased with the decision.69 Playing as a woman would alienate them from the game, they argued.
Journalist Sarah Ditum has little time for this argument. ‘Come on now,’ she chided in a column. ‘You’ve played games as a blue hedgehog. As a cybernetically augmented space marine. As a sodding dragon-tamer. [. . .B]ut the idea that women can be protagonists with an inner life and an active nature is somehow beyond your imaginative capacities?’70 Ditum is of course technically right. It should be easier to imagine yourself as a woman than as a blue hedgehog. But on the other hand she’s also wrong, because that blue hedgehog has one particularly important similarity with male players, even more so than species alignment, and that is that Sonic the hedgehog is male. We know this because he isn’t pink, he doesn’t have a bow in his hair, and he doesn’t simper. He is the standard, unmarked gender, not the atypical one.
This kind of negative reaction to the introduction of women is witnessed all over the cultural landscape. When in 2013 I campaigned to have a female historical figure on the back of English banknotes some men got so angry that they felt compelled to threaten me with rape, mutilation and death. Not all the men who disliked the campaign went that far, of course, but the sense of injustice was still clear in the more measured responses I got. I remember one man expostulating, ‘but women are everywhere now!’ Clearly, given I was having to campaign so hard for the inclusion of one woman, they aren’t, but his perspective was nevertheless telling. These men were experiencing even minor female representation as an iniquity. As far as they were concerned, the playing field was already level, and the entirely male line-up was just an objective reflection of merit.
Before they caved, the Bank of England’s case for their all-male line-up also rested on the meritocracy argument: historical figures were, they said, chosen using an ‘objective selection criteria’. To join the ‘gilded list’ of ‘key figures from our past’, a person must fulfil the following: have broad name recognition; have good artwork; not be controversial; and have made ‘a lasting contribution which is universally recognised and has enduring benefits’. Reading these subjective designations of worth, I realised how the Bank had ended up with five white men on its banknotes: the historical gender data gap means that women are just far less likely to be able to fulfil any of these ‘objective’ criteria.
In 1839 the composer Clara Schumann wrote in her diary, ‘I once thought that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?’ The tragedy is, Schumann was wrong. Women before her had been able to do it, and they included some of the most successful, prolific and influential composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.71 It’s just that they didn’t have ‘broad name recognition’, because a woman barely has to die before she is forgotten – or before we consign her work to the gender data gap by attributing it to a man.
Felix Mendelssohn published six of his sister Fanny Hensel’s pieces under his own name and in 2010 another manuscript previously thought to be his was proven to be Hensel’s.72 For years classical scholars argued that the Roman poet Sulpicia couldn’t possibly have written the verses signed with her name – they were too good, not to mention too smutty.73 Judith Leyster, one of the first Dutch women to be admitted to an artists’ guild, was renowned in her time, but after her death in 1660 she was erased, her work attributed to her husband. In 2017, new works by nineteenth-century artist Caroline Louisa Daly were discovered – they had been previously attributed to men, one of whom was not even an artist.74
At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill [. . .] an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’. She was right. Textbooks still routinely name Thomas Hunt Morgan as the person who discovered that sex was determined by chromosomes rather than environment, despite the fact that it was Nettie Stevens’ experiments on mealworms that established this – and despite the existence of correspondence between them where Morgan writes to ask Stevens for details of her experiment.75 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the sun is predominantly composed of hydrogen is often credited to her male supervisor.76 Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work
