Anderson holds up Google as an exemplar of what he dubbed ‘The Petabyte Age’, singing the praises of its ‘founding philosophy’ that ‘we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That’s why Google can translate languages without actually knowing them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German).’ Except, as we’ve seen, Google actually can’t translate very well at all, even ten years later. That is, if you care about women being erased from language.
So. Not so simple after all.
Anderson is right about one thing though. There is a better way. And it’s a pretty simple one: we must increase female representation in all spheres of life. Because as more women move into positions of power or influence, there’s another pattern that is becoming even more apparent: women simply don’t forget that women exist as easily as men often seem to.
Women in the film industry are more likely to employ women.11 Female journalists are significantly more likely to centre a female perspective and to quote women.12 Female authors do the same: 69% of US female biographers wrote about female subjects in 2015, compared to 6% of male biographers.13 The emphasis by women on female voices and perspectives extends to the academy. Between 1980 and 2007, female history faculty in the US rose from 15% to 35%14 – meanwhile across a similar time period (1975-2015), US history faculty specialising in women’s history rose from 1% to 10%15 – a tenfold increase. Female academics are also more likely to assign female authors to their students.16
Then there’s how women might interpret history: in a 2004 Guardian article comedian Sandi Toksvig wrote about how when she was studying anthropology at university one of her female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with twenty-eight markings on it. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is alleged to be man’s first attempt at a calendar.’ We all looked at the bone in admiration. ‘Tell me,’ she continued, ‘what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’17
When Britain’s EU Withdrawal Bill was announced in 2017, the Human Rights Act was explicitly excluded from alteration – but it took a woman, Maria Miller, the Conservative MP for Basingstoke, to force the government to agree to make a statement requiring that Brexit is also compatible with the Equalities Act.18 Without this concession, a whole range of women’s rights could be scrapped after Brexit, with no avenue for legal redress. In the workplace it is often women, like developmental biologist Christiane Nusslein-Volhard with her foundation to help female PhD students with children, who are putting in place solutions to structural male bias – a bias which male leaders have overlooked and ignored for decades.
Women are also leading the way when it comes to closing the gender data gap. A recent analysis of 1.5 million papers published between 2008-15 found that the likelihood of a study involving gender and sex analysis ‘increases with the proportion of women among its authors’19. The effect is particularly pronounced if a woman serves as a leader of the author group. This concern for women’s health also extends to the political sphere: it took a woman (Paula Sherriff, the Labour MP for Dewsbury) to set up the UK’s first All-Party Parliamentary group for women’s health in 2016. It was two rogue female Republicans who scotched Donald Trump’s attempts to repeal Obamacare (which would have disproportionately impacted on women), voting three times against his proposals.20
And women are making a difference in politics more generally. It was two women, Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded the UN-backed organisation Data2x that is aimed specifically at closing the global gender data gap. It was a woman, Hillary Clinton, who insisted on going to Beijing in 1995 to make the now famous declaration that ‘Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.’
And when the worst happens, women are there too, filling in the gaps left by male-biased disaster relief. Researchers found that the ‘masculine and muscular image[s] of relief workers’ that dominated the media post-Katrina were belied by women who were ‘working tirelessly and courageously’ behind the scenes.21 The same thing has happened in Puerto Rico, all but abandoned by the US government after Hurricane Maria devastated the region in 2017. ‘The reality is that when you go to communities, mostly it is women as leaders and as community organizers,’ Adi Martinez-Roman, executive director for a non-profit that provides legal assistance to low-income families, told journalist Justine Calma.22 These women have collected data by ‘wad[ing] into flooded neighbourhoods’ and canvassing the abandoned communities.23 And they have developed and provided evidence-based solutions. They’ve set up soup kitchens. They’ve raised money and rebuilt roads. They’ve distributed ‘solar-powered lights, generators, gas, clothes, shoes, tampons, batteries, medication, mattresses, water’. They set up ‘free legal aid societies to help families navigate the confusing and ill-designed processes required to file FEMA claims’. They’ve even managed to source some communal, solar-powered washing machines.
The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have
