The Language of Culture Change: When O’s and A’s and ‘Guys’ Matter More than We Think
I got up in front of the room of women, all eyes locked on me, the witch under the spotlight. Not kidding, I was literally dressed like a witch.
I’d be giving my first class on networking/community building, crafted specifically for military spouses, with all the challenges inherent in that lifestyle. I wasn’t nervous at all, I’d had a genius idea to build the class on a Wizard of Oz theme, & it was clever & fun.
One problem, I’d stood in front of the mirror, my hair purposeful puffed up & my witch hat perched sidewise at the perfect angle, and only practiced using the word ‘ladies’. Now, I stood, my blood pounding loudly through my veins, starting at the male spouse in the front row.
I should have expected it, but I hadn’t because, well, default thinking. When we think of a group of military spouses we think women, just like when we think of most other groups of people , we think men as the default. It’s simply what we’ve all been taught.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I had my talk all worked out to meet a specific time-hack & I wasn’t sure I could rework it on the fly. The thought of changing to the ubiquitous ‘guys’ just wouldn’t work — but also seemed so disrespectful to the 20 or so women in the room.
Why should it be that addressing a mixed group as ‘ladies’ should be considered offensive to the one guy in the room, but I knew that if I addressed the whole group as ‘guys’ nobody would have the nerve to complain.
I thought of the many times I’d been the only women at the table, in the room, on the sand — all the times during my Army career that I’d been the only women in the group, & nobody had thought twice about referring to us as ‘guys’.
Then I thought about every time I’d been in a group of all women with one or two guys. The crowd would be addressed as ‘ladies, and…. (nervous laughter) of course, you gentlemen.” nods in their direction, acknowledgement of their presence, smiles all around. I made a decision.
“I just want you to know,” I directed my voice to the man in the front row, “that when I use the term ‘ladies’ today, I’m intending to be inclusive. I understand & acknowledge that you are a man, but I’m used to giving this talk this way, I hope you understand.”
“Afterwards,” I added, starting to become aware of how to express what had always bothered me about the generic, ‘guys’ label, “let’s please have a talk about how it felt to have your presence erased from the room.” He smiled, he nodded. He played along. He felt weird & erased.
The class went well, & we talked afterwards. Naturally, as a male spouse, he lived in a rare world of default female thinking — where he was jokingly called an Army wife all the time. He’d always understood the humor, but had never realized the erasure aspect quite so intensely.
Neither had I. I’d thought about the term ‘guys’ before — about how unfair & ridiculous it is. When my husband had come home from his new unit, in the Special Operations Aviation Regiment, where he’d reported to duty alongside the first woman pilot they’d have, rolling his eyes.
“You know what she did today?” he exclaimed, exasperated! “She sent out an email to the distro, asking for people to please stop referring to the group as ‘guys’, isn’t that ridiculous?”
“Well babe,” I responded, “in the last six months, she’s done a great job, right?”
“Well, yes, she’s great.” He admitted.
“Well,” I continued, “is it maybe fair that she’d like her presence on the team to simply be acknowledged?”
He conceded that was right. And for both of us, our thinking progressed a little on that day.
We learned about male-norm thinking.
What is male-norm thinking? In feminist theory, the principle of male as norm holds that language referring to females, such as the suffix -ess (as in actress), the use of man to mean “human”, & other such devices (like ‘guys’ to refer to mixed-gender groups) strengthens the perceptions that the male category is the norm & that the corresponding female category is a derivation & thus less important.
Recently, male-norm thinking has been a topic of cultural conversation, & rightly so — women, at 51% of the global population, generally, are simply tired of being ignored. We live in a world where we are an afterthought, & it costs us — from time, money, to safety or our lives.
In her incredible book, “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, @CCriadoPerez states that “when you say man you don’t ‘include women too’, even if everyone *does* technically know that.”
“Numerous studies over the past forty years have consistently found that what is called the ‘generic masculine’ (using words like ‘he’ in a gender-neutral way) is not in fact read generically. It is read overwhelmingly as male.” (pg. 5)
This matters when we think about things like the foundations of our nation, the importance of written words like, “all men are created equal” & then we wonder why women struggle to be granted equal status or recognition in almost any part of modern life.
And luckily, English is not a grammatically gendered language. We make it so by choice. “it has made something of a comeback in the informal usage of Americanisms such as ‘dude’ & ‘guys’, &, in the UK, ‘lads’ as supposedly gender-neutral terms.” (Perez, 6)
In other languages, the power of the default-male is much stronger. “So a group of one hundred female teachers in Spanish would be referred to as ‘las professoras’ — but as soon as you add a single male teacher,…’los professores’. Such is the power of the default male.” (pg. 7)
But does it matter, or is it just snowflakes being sensitive? 🤷♀️ Science would suggests yes. (More in the comments).
Interestingly enough, it’s not ‘genderless languages’, like Hungarian, that show the most equality amongst genders, but a third group, “countries with ‘natural gender languages’ such as English.
These languages allow gender to be marked, but largely don’t encode it into the words themselves. The study authors suggested that if you can’t mark gender in any way, you can’t ‘correct’ the hidden bias in a language by emphasising ‘women’s presence in the world”
So, how do we correct it? Language change takes time, but as is so often said, yet rarely listened to, words matter.
I’ve set about trying to change default-male language in my life, which was harder than you’d think, because, I raise my daughter in 2 Latin-based languages — Portuguese, Spanish. It’s been a pretty amazing journey, and has taught me a lot about culture, vulnerability and life.
Turned out, she did it for us. When she neared the age of four, she became pretty focused on getting her words right. The interesting thing is the way that she simplified what I would otherwise think was a complex question, how to deal with gendered language.
The funny part about children is that things we think are complicated are often the things they find the simplest. My daughter has no time or patience for gendered language. She simply does not understand why I can’t take the time to say ‘amigos e amigas’.
After trying to explain the concept of the default pronoun, I realized that she was 100% right. I can take the time to do that. We just made the decision to get rid of it. Language is a tool, and as a tool, it can be whatever you want it to be — can be used to tear down or build up.
Instead of explaining to her the overwhelmingly obvious & unfair male-norm in lusophone & hispanophone languages, we just decided to take the time to acknowledge mixed groups — literally speaking the women back into existence.
I work on it often now, and I’ve found it really isn’t that complicated to just take an extra second to be representative. It’s not the only issue with Latin cultures and gendered language, by far, but it is a much simpler fix than I had thought.
After another year of work in cutting out ‘guys’ from my lexicon, I’m pretty good at de-gendering my English, too. To wrap up, when thinking and talking about language and culture, here are a few things to think about:
- Have You Talked to Your People about What Language Matters to Them?
If you’re a leader, have you taken the time to survey your group, to figure out what matters to them, & especially to make sure that the traditionally marginalized voices understand that their opinions will be listened to, believed, and carefully considered?
2) Remember that Making a Change Doesn’t Mean Blaming Ourselves or Others for the Past.
Often, we are hesitant to accept change, because accepting that something we’ve been doing all our lives might be something that has made other groups of people feel marginalized,
overlooked, or even harassed is a hard thing to face. Most of us are good people and have never intended to harm anyone.
A simple recognition that culture change happens, and once we “know better we do better” can go a long way to help us be accepting of culture change. We now know better about language.
3) Sometimes You Just Gotta Try It
Often, we use ‘operational concerns’ to mask our resistance to culture change or social improvements. In reality, it’s usually simpler than we think. Just make the change, then deal with the complications that actually pop up
— rather than trying to predict ahead of time what complications will make it impossible. It’s usually less complicated than we think.
It’s important to remember that we are living through turbulent times in the world of culture — things seem to be changing on a dime, & groups that have never had a voice before are beginning to claim theirs.
There’s no such thing as a ‘little issue’ when it comes to culture. Culture is an index of every interaction that takes place at any time among any people in your organization. Something as simple as the use of the word ‘guys’ could be making all the difference.
Daniella Mestyanek Young is an American author and TEDx Speaker. Daniella has been breaking through barriers and challenging authority figures since her earliest childhood memories growing up in the horrifying Children of God Cult and on through her service and deployment to war twice. Daniella served as part of the first group of women who integrated into deliberate combat arms missions back in 2011 and has since spent the majority of her time leading in veteran service organizations to try and help folks heal and find their own definition of success after their service.
Daniella is married to the world’s best special operations helicopter pilot (retired) and speaks primarily in Brazilian Portuguese with her daughter, who sasses her back in three languages. Daniella is currently at work on her memoir, Uncultured. She can be found speaking speaking truth to power, irritating vetbros and stamping out the kyriarchy on Twitter @daniellamyoung.