{"id":3478,"date":"2012-08-13T13:21:11","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T18:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/citings\/?p=3478"},"modified":"2012-08-13T13:21:11","modified_gmt":"2012-08-13T18:21:11","slug":"hes-shes-and-zes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2012\/08\/13\/hes-shes-and-zes\/","title":{"rendered":"Hes, Shes, and Zes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sample<\/a>
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\u201cZe,\u201d the person sitting next to me at the fire said. \u201cZe,\u201d I repeated tentatively. In my first year of graduate school, I wound up doing fieldwork at a radical environmental conference in the mountains of Oregon.\u00a0 While I learned about setting up roadblocks and doing tree sits, I also learned about gender-neutral pronouns.<\/p>\n

Most texts aren\u2019t quite to the point of using \u201cze.\u201d But, according to a new study by Psychologists Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile, gaps between the use of \u201che\u201d and \u201cshe\u201d in books have narrowed. As a writer from Associated Press explains<\/a>, the study tracked pronouns in almost 1.2 million texts in Google books archives. In 1950, the ratio of male to female pronouns was roughly 3.5:1. By 2005, it had shrunk to less than 2:1.<\/p>\n

“Those numbers are quite staggering,” says\u00a0James W. Pennebaker<\/a>, author of The Secret Life of Pronouns <\/em>and chair of the\u00a0psychology department\u00a0at the University of Texas in Austin. “Pronouns are a sign of people paying attention and as women become more present in the workforce, in the media and life in general, people are referring to them more.”<\/p>\n

Books by and about women have proliferated in the last half-century. However, more books by women do not mean that more books are getting reviewed or more women are getting to write for literary publications. For example, the nonprofit VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has shown that men receive more space in magazines like The New Yorker <\/em>and The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n

The continued prevalence of male writers\/male reviewers is “very much the old guard hanging on, as they always do,” Belieu [the Executive Director of VIDA] adds. “But the progressive mind wins in the long ball game.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And maybe we\u2019ll even more \u201cze\u2019s\u201d in texts in the future!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cZe,\u201d the person sitting next to me at the fire said. \u201cZe,\u201d I repeated tentatively. In my first year of graduate school, I wound up doing fieldwork at a radical environmental conference in the mountains of Oregon.\u00a0 While I learned about setting up roadblocks and doing tree sits, I also learned about gender-neutral pronouns. Most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[17224],"class_list":["post-3478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-language-gender"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3478"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3483,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3478\/revisions\/3483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}