http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/11/100111fa_fact_collins

Whether her name was pronounced Soda-may-er (Senator Jeff Sessions), Soto-my-ur (Senator Richard Durbin), Soto-my-air (Senator Al Franken), or Soto-may-ay-or (Senator Tom Coburn), she cut a relatable figure. The Bronx congressman Jose Serrano said that, after her nomination, “people on the street would come running up to me and talk about ‘Sonia,’ like she’s their cousin, or their niece.”

Searching for “Beauvoir” yields 37,600 hits. Removing “Simone” returns 38% the number of hits. Yet doing the same for “Sartre” and “Jean-Paul” returns 49% the number of hits. In this case, then, in comparing these two authors, there is evidence towards saying that “Simone” and “Beauvoir” are paired more often than “Jean-Paul” and “Sartre.” But it’s certainly not the case that one is always referred to by full name, and the other nearly never.

Sedgwick, Spivak, and Butler, however, lose far fewer hits (<15% each, with Butler's change almost unnoticeable) when you remove the first names, suggesting that the first names don't play nearly as big a role as with Beauvoir (or even Sartre!).

Of course, the very initial issue (last name scarcity) makes these envelope calculations rather useless; I knew about Michael Spivak the mathematician far before Gayatri the critic. It's very possible that half of the hits on "Butler" have absolutely nothing to do with a specifically named person, seeing as Butler is not only a common last name (my diss quotes Robert more than Judith), but also an occupation.

This, of course, looks like more being defensive, but I'm just not totally convinced, considering my own gender-neutral rules for naming people in my writing. On the other hand, whether the problem is quantitatively demonstrable or not, the benefit of the conversation is that I'm aware of the *potential* problem, which has its own value. So If I have done it unconsciously in the past, now I'll consciously avoid doing it.

1) I think the real issue here centers on the intial reaction of incredulity to the idea that there would be a pervasive difference regarding how male and female academics are referenced. The instant incredulity with which such things are met is unfortunate, and I think emblematic of how academics, and people in the culture at large, cope with problems of inequality. It’s well worth examining, and perhaps doing away with, these automatic responses. (My own responses, particularly my initial one, didn’t exactly buck this trend, and for that I apologize).

2) When I said that the problem seems “fairly benign,” I meant in comparison to other issues that might bear more directly on the rank, or perception of respect given, to a person of authority, whether in a workplace, or in a text, or a friendly conversation. For example, it would seem to me that, while most people in the humanities know Judith Butler as “Judith Butler,” she hasn’t exactly suffered for it. Perhaps there are female academics stalled out in the periphery owing, in part, to this phenomenon. I don’t know. It seems a likelihood. All I can say is that, personally, I’m worried far more about the audacious displays of sexism that I can clearly identify, without a doubt (say, an unsanctioned, assumed familiarity with female professors in one’s academic department, something which can clearly be understood as an undercutting of respect and rank) than I am about this particular issue, which it seems could be read in a number of ways that aren’t explicitly destructive.

3) What I seek here–though I clearly haven’t done a good job of expressing it, and have actually undermined that stance, since I’m working through these ideas myself–is the opposite of an automatic response, which again, I see as the core issue of Eli’s initial post. Upon reflection, I find the naming convention at hand “fairly benign,” and I think I’ll stick by that response. But this isn’t to say that I can’t see why people would find offense in it. What I reject is this notion that, when met with a difference like this, we must have the automatic response that it is a bad/wrong thing. Eli commented that, since there is no reason for male and female academics to be named differently in the context of conversation or texts (referring to, say, Butler or Sartre), that this difference is “wrong.” But if I can’t think of a single way in which this convention has bolstered Sartre and diminished Butler, I’m hardpressed to see it as anything other than a difference. One worth examinining, certainly, and one whose effects probably run the gamut from relative “neutrality” to raw trivialization, depending on the instance in question.

4) The problem with seepage of issues that I mentioned in my last post is, I think, muddying the issue a bit. In conversation, Eli said to me that this is, in part, an issue of treatment in the workplace, but I thought we were talking about how “notable thinkers,” people of a certain fame in academia, are referred to in professional conversation and texts. If this is about calling female professors by their first names and male professors by their titles and last names, then I think that (a) familiarity should not be assumed simply because a professor is female, but that (b) obviously if a professor, any professor, makes it clear that familiarity is okay, we shouldn’t be at pains to make sure that we steer clear of it merely for the sake of making our addresses equal, and that (c) there may be issues other than gender at play (age and changes in professional philosophy come explicitly to mind) in any disparity.

5) Automatically coming to the conclusion that difference is bad/wrong is just as incredulous a response as instantly concluding that there is no problem to begin with. Especially when, divorced from anecdotal context, the fact that there is a difference is really the only concrete thing we can seize upon.

Max, I agree with your most recent post a lot more than your second to last one. The basic topic here, at least the one I described in my post, is specifically (2); I quite agree that your (3) is a different issue. As for your continuing doubts about whether the underlying pattern is offensive, well, as Mike said, we do know that there are some people who are bothered by it. Myself included.

And again, I think the problem isn’t inherent in the use of a first name; rather, the problem has to do with the specific gender disparity in naming practices. In itself, reference by firstname+lastname seems benign, as you say. But when women academic writers are singled out to be first-named in a professional context of reference then that’s what becomes a matter of gender discrimination. The point is that someone like Judith Butler is called “Judith Butler” a lot more than an approximately similar academic like Foucault is called “Michel Foucault.” You still can’t see how that might be problematic?

I remind you all in passing that this post is about more than the way we name each other’s names; it is also about how we should think about gender in academic life. Let’s try not to let that get lost here either?

1) How notable male and female academics/thinkers (Butler/Sartre) are referred to in academic texts.

2) How notable male and female academics/thinkers (Butler/Sartre) are referred to in conversations between academics.

3) How academics local to one’s intellectual community (a graduate department in a university, for example) are referred to in their presence (Mary or John, as opposed to Dr./Prof. So-and-So).

I don’t think these conventions are necessarily one in the same, and it would be worth delineating what convention, exacty, we’re talking about. I think it began as a mixture of 1 and 2, which bear a greater resemblance to one another, but 3 has popped up as well. And I think the issues underlying the phenomenon are probably far too complex for us to lose sight of what, exactly, we’re talking about.

I’m still puzzled as to how the marking offends, or whether it can even adequately be termed a “marking,” in the sense that it constitutes a conscious or unconscious undermining of womens’ roles in academia (or whatever one believes the suggested fallout of the naming convention to be). Even if the marking functions to set male and female academics as “different,” I don’t get the feeling that it diminishes one or the other. Since when must being “different” instantly decode as inferior?

On “presumptive familiarity,” I don’t think that addressing somebody by first and last name, especially in an academic article, implies such a thing. If a writer referred to Judith Butler simply as “Judith,” throughout a piece of academic literature, I would find that highly suspect. But the full name? I just don’t see any kind of distortion going on there.

Another thing: what of the possibility that female academics tend to develop more friendly, positive relationships with, say, graduate students? Ones that more frequently allow students to address them by first name? I have no science here to back me up, of course. But the scheme of referring to a professor as “Professor” or “Dr” so-and-so feels, to me, to be not only an outdated standard, but one that is more likely to be demanded by (older) males in the academic profession. If this is the case, then it’s interesting that the first name/last name convention would be immediately assumed “wrong,” rather than just “different,” perhaps a sign not that women are being marginalized, trivialized, etc. but that things are changing in academia as a whole.

In any case, I’ve never met a single professor who wasn’t called exactly what he/she clearly demanded to be called, in his/her own presence. I especially don’t think graduate students (to refer to the page Pablo linked before) are normally in the habit of speaking on a first name basis with their professors unless they know, explicitly, that it’s okay to do so.

I’m happy to err on the side of not unnecessarly marking a group of people because the consequences of marking are uncertain I can do so at low cost. If I knew the consequences of marking were negligible, I wouldn’t really care.
But at minimum, we already know that some people have noticed and care. Perhaps people would care less if they knew that the marking did not result in further disadvantage, but this is not something we can assure them.

But Is gendered naming generally wrong? Should we campaign all children be given androgynous names?