April 12, 2013
Lisa Wade writes about the “obituary edition” of men-are-people and women-are-women
Sociologist Lisa Wade, on the Sociological Images blog, reproduces NewsDiff’s tracking graphic of the changes that were made in the recent New York Times online obituary for rocket scientist Yvonne Brill. These changes were not the usual kinds of corrections newspapers frequently make (after misspelling a name, misidentifying a photo, and so on). Instead, they involved necessary rewording because of an outcry over the obituary’s leading paragraph. The writer had cited Brill’s domestic achievements (her beef stroganoff, her willingness to move following her husband’s job relocations, her being a good mom), waiting until the second paragraph to announce she was “also” a pioneering rocket scientist. According to the New York Times public editor’s report after the uproar, the obituary editor and the writer did not see anything sexist about it and would have preferred that their original wording had remained. They indicated that by starting off with Brill’s domesticity, they thought the “aha moment” would occur in the following paragraph in which (surprise!) it would be announced that she was “also a brilliant rocket scientist.”
Of course, the writer would never have written an obituary about a male scientist in such a way. Sociologist Wade sees what happened in this incident as just one more example in which men are seen as the “default” human beings, people, and women are seen as—well, women—and thus must be treated differently. Wade has a Pinterest page with other examples. Gloria Steinem puts it this way: “Here’s a skeleton key to what has to change: . . . Women still require an adjective and males don’t. There is a ‘novelist’ and a ‘woman novelist,’ [as there is a] ‘doctor’ and a ‘black doctor.’ ”
