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?

Max, you know I generally respect your opinions, but I think that here you are very much on the wrong track. First of all, the question of naming has nothing to do with identity politics and I never said there was any “political” issue here. The phenomenon — though the extent of its occurrence does remain an open question — is better understood a form of academic workplace discrimination. And a preliminary thought is that it’s just a priori objectionable to be constantly marking women as women (by the very act of mentioning their first names and also by the fact that first names generally encode & reveal gender) when this marking is completely irrelevant to academic conversation. The philosophical question here is whether gratuitously marking a particular group of people is wrong even if this has no immediate further effects. I think it is.

But there are, in any event, further effects that go beyond abstract questions of unequal marking and labeling. The major issue, as I see it (this was also examined for the Hillary Clinton case on Jezebel) has to do with presumptive familiarity. There’s a kind of sexism that consists in taking the liberty to presume (unearned) intimacy with women that one would not presume with men. That may not have directly negative impacts on, say, average salaries. But it can obviously affect how women academics perceive themselves and are perceived by their colleagues, and yes, there are people who care about this sort of thing, even if you aren’t (yet) one of them. More broadly, the whole ideological system that equates femininity with intimacy probably indirectly affects women’s roles in the university, as Hogan (whose first name I had to restrain myself from typing) has commented in a very interesting essay on women’s service work in academia.

My broader thought about this, at any rate, is that academic men have a lot to learn from their women colleagues about the entwinements of gender, power and respect in academic life. It would be a pity if the responses to this post ended up repeating the masculine skepticism that the post is supposed to be putting in question.

http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2007/10/naming-names.html

Perhaps I’m missing something. Can you explain why this difference in address might be a substantial problem? I’m straining to do so myself. The best I can come up with is that referring to somebody by last name only may indicate a more intimate level of familiarity, or imply that the audience is expected be more familiar with the person being addressed. It feels like a stretch to find offense here, but then again, maybe I’m shopping for justifications. Who knows?

I think that this quibble is emblematic of an identity politics perhaps splintered-too-far, in which taking offense, finding a new basis for conflict, becomes the ever-necessary “next step.” I wonder, for example, if Judith Butler minds that she is often referred to as “Judith Butler,” or if I should feel offended for her without regard to the question’s answer. I can’t see an end to this dilemma that doesn’t result in the unnecessary alienation of allies.

Really, “fairly benign”??

I’m also glad to have the brief illustration of what you would do with a more serious quantitative analysis of this question. I encourage you to experiment! (though wouldn’t it require a textual analysis program that could recognize first and last names and identify their genders? and you’d need a fairly large corpus of texts — and all this would probably be harder to arrange than the statistical analysis per se.)

That said, I don’t think you should chastise yourself for some skepticism. When someone makes a claim, we should ALWAYS be skeptical. Yes, we should be on the lookout for motivated skepticism. But I’d prefer that we increase skepticism of claims that justify our high status rather than decrease skepticism of claims that we benefit from unearned privilege.

As a quantitative sociologist, I think we could learn a great deal with a statistical approach. I can think of a lot of things I’d want to consider, but one of them would be to account for the prominence of the professor. More prominent professors are probably more likely to be referred to by last name only. More prominent professors are more likely to be men. What happens to the pattern when google hits and citations are accounted for? Perhaps naming is also related to behaviors/personality and behaviors/personality differ across gender.

At the risk of being pedantic I’ll give a very simple explanation of how we’d approach this problem using regression. First we identify our outcome of interest, e.g. the percentage of the time someone is referred to by last name only, first name only, or full name. Then we identify things that might predict this outcome, e.g. gender, citations, field, popularity of name, personality, etc. We run our data through the machinery of regression (important details omitted) and this gives us an equation for predicting the outcome. The “Last-Naming-Gap” is equal to the coefficient on the gender predictor. This will vary depending on which other predictors we include. If we include the right variables, the coefficient may go to zero, in which case we might say to we “explained” the “last-naming-gap”? Note this would NOT disprove discrimination. For example, it is quite possible that the gender differences in citations that we are using to “explain” the last-naming-gap, are themselves partially the result of gender bias. And a bias that results in citation differences would be more obviously consequential than a bias that results in a different use of language. Anyway, thanks for the interesting post Eli. (cross posted at my blog, I encourage commenters to respond to it at both places).