What are women doing wrong when
Deborah Cameron on the chronic question do women and men write differently, and if so how much more do women suck at writing?
When people ask questions about male-female differences, they’re rarely motivated just by idle curiosity. They may formulate the question as a neutral inquiry into the facts of a given matter (‘how do men and women do X?’), but often the underlying question is more like ‘why do women have a problem doing X?’, or ‘what are women doing wrong when they do X?’
Aka why can’t women do anything correctly, the way men do it?
In one study of the language of blogs, the researchers found what appeared to be differences between male and female bloggers; but on closer inspection they turned out to be more closely related to the distinction between ‘diary’ blogs, containing the author’s personal reflections, and ‘filter’ or content-sharing blogs, where the author comments on the links s/he recommends. This looked like a gender difference because more women in the sample produced diary blogs, and more men produced content-sharing blogs. Of course that in itself is a gender difference; but it’s not a gender difference in writing style, it’s a gendered preference for different kinds of blogs.
I wonder if women tend to absorb a veiled message from the culture around them that the only thing women really know much about is their own individual selves. If so, that’s tragic. I get a lot of shit from the many tweeters and bloggers who hate me for doing a mostly content-sharing blog, but I think that’s an asinine complaint. I’m interested in a lot of things that aren’t Me, and I share them on my blog – why is that a bad thing? It’s too much interest in the Self that I think is a bad thing.
There used to be a site where you could paste in some text and it would tell you whether a woman or a man wrote it. Most people used it to test their own writing.
Obviously they already knew if they were male or female, so presumably what they were trying to find out was whether their writing was gender-typical. And when the Genie told them it wasn’t (which happened frequently: while I was monitoring it its success rate never got above 68%), their reactions were instructive. Almost no one concluded that there was something wrong with the program, or with the basic idea of gendered writing styles. More commonly they fell to pondering why they, as individuals, did not match the profile for a ‘normal’ male or female writer.
Women who’d been misidentified as men often put this down to being ex-tomboys or geeks who had no truck with ‘girly’ things: none of them seemed offended by being told they wrote like men, and sometimes they appeared to be flattered. Men who were miscategorized as women, by contrast, more often expressed bafflement, annoyance or discomfort. They also got teased by other people in the comments: had they been writing poetry again? Were they secretly gay?
Yep. Being perceived as male or male-like, good; being perceived as the other thing, bad.
These contrasting responses underline the point that gender isn’t just a difference, it’s a hierarchy. As Caroline Criado-Perez notes in her book Do It Like A Woman, to do something ‘like a woman’ usually means to do it badly, or less well than a man would do it. It’s your basic deficit model, in which men set the standard of excellence and whatever women do is somehow deficient, weak and inferior.
Women’s writing, on the face of things, is not an obvious candidate for this treatment. If we consider writing as a basic skill, it’s one on which girls outperform boys from an early age, and if we consider it as an art, it’s one that women have excelled in for centuries. And yet the idea has persisted that men do it better. Only yesterday, I heard a male writer on the radio explaining why he preferred to read other male writers: one of the reasons he gave was that men’s writing gets to the point (while women’s by implication beats endlessly about the bush). Had he ever, I wondered, opened Finnegan’s Wake, or any of the novels of Henry James?
Seriously. Jane Austen? Emily Bronte? Straight to the point, with not a word wasted. Thackeray? Dickens? Not so much.
Abrupt ending.
Oh, that’s not true. Women are better than men at lots of things. Why, there’s cleaning the house, taking care of children, shopping for groceries…. you’re so much better at these that we’ve decided, in the interests of efficiency, you understand, to cede them to you.
“Men’s writing gets to the point” Not in any Universe of books I’ve read.
There are two (sub)types of writers. Those who get to the point and those who don’t. Sex/gender has nothing to do with it. Ultimate quality of writing has nothing to do with it (depending on genre/purpose of course).
As for the program to determine if writing was produced by a man/woman, GIGO for sure.
When I, just for a lark, posted some of my writing in a program that would tell you who you wrote like, I got back male writers. My husband also got male writers. I don’t know how the programs match you, but I think I actually write like a person. Of course, the fact that almost all my novels have female protagonists, even if they are doing STEM things and other “guy things”, would probably trigger most people to claim I am woman, since apparently men don’t write about women (in the common stereotype) except as secondary characters.
iknklast, Meir Shalev, one of my favorite Israeli novelists, says that of all his protagonists, the one he identified most with was the protagonist of ‘Two She Bears’, who is a woman. But then Shalev was heavily influenced by his maternal grandmother (as he described in his memoir ‘My Russian Grandmother and her American Vacuum Cleaner’).
Moby Dick had a chapter on harpoons. That was the style of novels early on, to force in educational content, but it didn’t get to the point.
One of Raymond Chandlers best chapters beat around the bush. It was just Philip Marlowe struggling with his own thoughts while driving, trying not to be overcome with misanthropic judgment on the world around him.
Getting to the point is not always the point of writing. When it is, there’s no reason to assume it is gender differences that make it that way.
On the other hand, I bet if people were asked to turn in a sample piece centered on a female character, the accuracy rate of classifying the writers as male or female would go up quickly.
It’s the pink ink wot gives it away.
Time to post this again.
http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/scent-of-a-womans-ink/
From the above, here’s Francine Prose (yes, I know, but this piece is great) addressing confirmation bias in judging writing by women:
There should be a break between “Tell her–well, tell her I’m sorry,” (first sample,) and “The man was trying to say something but he was only wheezing.”
Sorry about the length. :/
As a long time science fiction fan I’m reminded of the writer James Tiptree jr. Tiptree who wrote highly popular and critically accalimed SF from 1967. Tiptree was reclusive – unusual in the SF world where authors and fans are have long been equal parts of the fandom culture and his identity was a popular source of debate – both JD Salinger and Henry Kissinger were suggested. Finally there came rumours that Tiptree might – quelle horreur – be a woman. This caused some considerable shock and consternation amongst the Good Old Boys of the fandom…
Grand Old Master of the genre, Robert Silverberg, summed up the general feeling when he said:
It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.
The punchline is obvious. In 1977 Tiptree was finally “outed” as 62 year old Alice Bradley Sheldon.
And, oh, ugh, I checked wikipedia to make sure I had the right years/ages and came across this delightful passage:
Alice Sheldon’s gender was female, but she performed as a male both through her professional and personal writings.
I think she’d be spinning in her grave at the idea she was “performing as a man” when she wrote. WTF does that even mean? That there’s a male way of writing but you can still do it if you’re female? For a writer who has been justly praised for her work examining and breaking down gender stereotypes and barriers that seems unpleasantly… reductive.
Steamshovelmama, a long time fan of Alice Sheldon here.
I’m not sure at all about her reaction. That’s what she wrote in her diary after the outing:
Horrible words, don’t you think? Perhaps they give some psychological meaning to her “performing as male”? Not the meaning in terms of a male way of writing, no, something different. But how to define it?
Wikipedia quotes her as saying “A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” This sounds like a decent explanation of adopting the pseudonym – but there is nothing about self-hate here, nothing about the feeling of being finished as a writer after being “exposed”. The journal entry definitely hints at a richer, darker, more complicated story.
My high-school English teacher once told us that you could always tell whether a paper was written by a boy or a girl (he meant us)–and you didn’t have to rely on the handwriting.
People do have distinctive writing styles. Dan Foster (Author Unknown) identifies individuals by their writing style. He does it by comparing a sample of unknown authorship to samples know to be written by specific people. It’s like literary forensics. It would be interesting to ask him if finds reliable differences between the writing of men and women.
A good writer (e.g. a novelist) ought to be able to write in the style or voice of whatever person/persona/character/gender they choose. I mean, that’s part of what writing fiction is all about, no?
Programs like this can be remarkably unsophisticated. You pull back the curtain and find it is little more than a parlor trick.
Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to do something like this:
1. Parse the sentence structure, and then run it against a bunch of rules (e.g. men use the active voice; women use the passive voice)
2. Get a big corpus of text written by men, and a big corpus written by women. Do a Google-style full-text search of the submitted sample against both corpora, and see which one it more resembles.
Unless there is a body of peer-reviewed research establishing the validity of 1, then it is on par with graphology or phrenology, dressed up in a web interface, and the rules probably tell us more about the person who wrote them (men use the active voice; women use the passive voice) than the person who submitted the writing sample.
The problem with 2. is that what it probably picks up in the first instance is differences in vocabulary, which probably reflect differences in chosen subject matter, which plausibly could differ between men and women, but probably don’t have much to do with writing style per se.
Steven – did you read the linked post? Of course programs like this can be remarkably unsophisticated – that’s part of Cameron’s point. She’s a linguist.
@Ariel
I’ll give it a shot. Writing as Tiptree, Alice Sheldon could ignore the hypercritical voice so many women have in their heads, the one giving voice to all the internalized misogyny, the one worrying if you write that they’ll dismiss it/laugh/regard you as a freak. She could write as she pleased, give her imagination free rein, without self consciousness, knowing her writing would be judged as writing, without that extra critical overlay of expectation and prejudice given to writing-by-a-woman.
***
I recently finished reading a new (yes, new) collection of Shirley Jackson’s writing (unpublished plus long forgotten stuff.) It includes a nonfiction piece about clowns. Jackson went around asking friends about clowns, their favorites, the routines they loved best, etc. When she raised the possibility of women clowns, almost everyone she spoke to was adamant that women couldn’t be clowns. She rationalized this by saying that everybody has to be able to relate to a clown’s suffering, therefore clowns have to be impersonal, and impersonality “is not a feminine characteristic.”
That. There. Men are human and their experience is universal; women are women and their experience is personal and particular. (Never mind the problems with that formulation; confirmation bias will make sure you read the sexes accordingly. Which is one reason why male pseudonyms are helpful.)
OK, I went back and read Cameron’s article. It’s really good. And hey, there’s a whole blog there. Maybe I’ll try following it :)
I’m not a linguist, but I do think linguistic analysis is interesting.
Yes. That’s why I keep yammering about the endless stream of Hollywood movies starring 4 or 5 men, as if men were the only people who count.
Stop trampling on my humanity!!!!!1111!1
:-)