I usually try to mix it up. A quick count shows 6 male examples and 2 female examples, which was not a deliberate choice, but I guess I can be more intentional about a more even split in future?
Note that a 6⁄2 split (as in this post) would happen fairly frequently when tossing coins (~20% of the time, unless I miss my guess). Since alicey found that jarring, I expect that purposeful alternation would be a better strategy.
Maybe make 4 ♂ symbols and 4 ♀ symbols (if you know there will be 8 cases together) and shuffle them? Oh, I guess even in that case someone would complain if one set of symbols happened to get predominantly at the top of the article, and other set at the bottom of the article...
So probably it is best to alter them like this: ABABABAB… or maybe like this: ABBAABBA… with a coin flip deciding who is A and who is B.
More jarring than that is if one set of gender pronouns gets used predominantly in negative examples, and the other set gets used predominantly in positive examples.
I try to deliberately switch based on context. If I wrote an example of someone being wrong and then someone being right. I will stick with the same gender for both cases, and then switch to the other gender when I move to the next example of someone being wrong, right, or indifferent.
Occasionally, something will be so inherently gendered that I cannot use the non-default gender and feel reasonable doing it. In these cases, I actually don’t think I should. (Triggers: sexual violence. I was recently writing about violence, including rape, and I don’t think I could reasonable alternate pronouns for referring to the rapist because, while not all perpetrators are male, they are so overwhelmingly male that it would be unreasonable to use “she” in isolation. I mixed “he” with an occasional “he or she” for the extremely negative examples in those few paragraphs.)
Precisely for this reason, there was a time when I wrote in Elverson pronouns (basically, Spivak pronouns) for gender ambiguous cases. So, if I was writing about Bill Clinton, I would use “he,” and if I was writing about Grace Hopper, I would use “she,” but if I was writing about somebody/anybody in would use, I would use “ey” instead. This allows one to easily compile the pronouns according to preference without mis-attributing pronouns to actual people… I’ve always planned on getting around to hosting my own blog running on my own code which would include an option to let people set a cookie to store their gender preference so they could get “she by default”, “he by default”, “Spivak by default”, or randomization between he and she—with a gimmick option for switching between different sets of gender neutral pronouns at random. The default default being randomization between he and she. But I haven’t gotten around to writing the website to host my stuff yet, and I just use unmodified blogger, so for now I’m doing deliberate switching by hand as described above.
(I think I could write a script like that for blogger too, but I haven’t bothered looking into how to customize blogger because I keep planning to write my own website anyways because there are a lot of things I want to differently, and that’s not necessarily the one that’s at the top of my list.)
Oddly, I also came away with an impression of ‘male pronoun as default’, and on rereading it seems that e.g. I strongly noticed the male pronoun in 13, but did not notice the female pronoun in 14. I guess I’ve just been trained to notice default-male-pronoun usages. (You did also use ‘singular they’ in example 7, which to me reads much more naturally than pronoun alternation.)
Huh, I missed the pronoun in 14 too. I suspect the 6:2 ratio is less of an issue than three male references being before the first female one. I noticed “Lisa”, but at that point I already had the idea that the article was gender-biased. Confirmation bias I suppose.
For every person that finds “male pronoun as default” jarring, I’d expect there to be two who find consciously alternating between genders jarring, and five for most of the more exotic alternatives. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea after taking everything into account, but if all you care about is ease of reading, you’d have to have a very specific audience in mind for this solution to make sense to me.
IME I’ve mostly found that using plural pronouns without calling attention to them works well enough, except in cases where there’s another plural pronoun in the same phrase. That is, “Sam didn’t much care for corn, because it got stuck in their teeth” rarely causes comment (though I expect it to cause comment now, because I’ve called attention to it), but “Sam didn’t much care for corn kernels, because they got stuck in their teeth” makes people blink.
(Of course, this is no different from any other shared-pronoun situation. “Sam didn’t much care for kissing her boyfriend, because her tongue kept getting caught in his braces” is clear enough, but “Sam didn’t much care for kissing her girlfriend, because her tongue kept getting caught in her braces” is decidedly unclear.)
I usually try to mix it up. A quick count shows 6 male examples and 2 female examples, which was not a deliberate choice, but I guess I can be more intentional about a more even split in future?
I think Eliezer mentioned once that he flips a coin for such cases. I think it’s a pretty good policy.
Note that a 6⁄2 split (as in this post) would happen fairly frequently when tossing coins (~20% of the time, unless I miss my guess). Since alicey found that jarring, I expect that purposeful alternation would be a better strategy.
Maybe make 4 ♂ symbols and 4 ♀ symbols (if you know there will be 8 cases together) and shuffle them? Oh, I guess even in that case someone would complain if one set of symbols happened to get predominantly at the top of the article, and other set at the bottom of the article...
So probably it is best to alter them like this: ABABABAB… or maybe like this: ABBAABBA… with a coin flip deciding who is A and who is B.
You can also simply use standard names:
Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Erin, Frank...
More jarring than that is if one set of gender pronouns gets used predominantly in negative examples, and the other set gets used predominantly in positive examples.
I try to deliberately switch based on context. If I wrote an example of someone being wrong and then someone being right. I will stick with the same gender for both cases, and then switch to the other gender when I move to the next example of someone being wrong, right, or indifferent.
Occasionally, something will be so inherently gendered that I cannot use the non-default gender and feel reasonable doing it. In these cases, I actually don’t think I should. (Triggers: sexual violence. I was recently writing about violence, including rape, and I don’t think I could reasonable alternate pronouns for referring to the rapist because, while not all perpetrators are male, they are so overwhelmingly male that it would be unreasonable to use “she” in isolation. I mixed “he” with an occasional “he or she” for the extremely negative examples in those few paragraphs.)
That seems like it’d interrupt the flow of writing.
It’d be interesting if there was some sort of compiler that did this for you :)
Precisely for this reason, there was a time when I wrote in Elverson pronouns (basically, Spivak pronouns) for gender ambiguous cases. So, if I was writing about Bill Clinton, I would use “he,” and if I was writing about Grace Hopper, I would use “she,” but if I was writing about somebody/anybody in would use, I would use “ey” instead. This allows one to easily compile the pronouns according to preference without mis-attributing pronouns to actual people… I’ve always planned on getting around to hosting my own blog running on my own code which would include an option to let people set a cookie to store their gender preference so they could get “she by default”, “he by default”, “Spivak by default”, or randomization between he and she—with a gimmick option for switching between different sets of gender neutral pronouns at random. The default default being randomization between he and she. But I haven’t gotten around to writing the website to host my stuff yet, and I just use unmodified blogger, so for now I’m doing deliberate switching by hand as described above.
(I think I could write a script like that for blogger too, but I haven’t bothered looking into how to customize blogger because I keep planning to write my own website anyways because there are a lot of things I want to differently, and that’s not necessarily the one that’s at the top of my list.)
Oddly, I also came away with an impression of ‘male pronoun as default’, and on rereading it seems that e.g. I strongly noticed the male pronoun in 13, but did not notice the female pronoun in 14. I guess I’ve just been trained to notice default-male-pronoun usages. (You did also use ‘singular they’ in example 7, which to me reads much more naturally than pronoun alternation.)
Huh, I missed the pronoun in 14 too. I suspect the 6:2 ratio is less of an issue than three male references being before the first female one. I noticed “Lisa”, but at that point I already had the idea that the article was gender-biased. Confirmation bias I suppose.
nod. Sounds reasonable!
It might help to be more intentional, to prevent people from having jarring experiences like that.
For every person that finds “male pronoun as default” jarring, I’d expect there to be two who find consciously alternating between genders jarring, and five for most of the more exotic alternatives. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea after taking everything into account, but if all you care about is ease of reading, you’d have to have a very specific audience in mind for this solution to make sense to me.
(Not my downvote, by the way.)
IME I’ve mostly found that using plural pronouns without calling attention to them works well enough, except in cases where there’s another plural pronoun in the same phrase. That is, “Sam didn’t much care for corn, because it got stuck in their teeth” rarely causes comment (though I expect it to cause comment now, because I’ve called attention to it), but “Sam didn’t much care for corn kernels, because they got stuck in their teeth” makes people blink.
(Of course, this is no different from any other shared-pronoun situation. “Sam didn’t much care for kissing her boyfriend, because her tongue kept getting caught in his braces” is clear enough, but “Sam didn’t much care for kissing her girlfriend, because her tongue kept getting caught in her braces” is decidedly unclear.)