I saw this somewhere else — don't remember where now (other than Digg, that is) — and the same thing happens with "she succeeded" and "she led," but it offers no suggested corrections for "she failed" or "she followed."

I don't think, though I may be mistaken, that this says anything much about Google itself. After all, Google's job is to help searchers get to the page they're looking for, so presumably their suggestion engine works from some sort of analysis of the indexed web pages. That is, I think it's likely that Google is accurately depicting a biased source, i.e. the subset of the English-language part of the Internet where words like "succeeded," "failed," "invented," "followed" and "led" are commonly used.

Now what this says about Google, well I leave that to you. . .

It says nothing, since Google's search engine is a formula.

I picked this book up once, in a fit of anger over my daughter assuming the same thing - that women don't invent things:

"1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Women's History" by Constance Jones
(link goes to Amazon page)

Fascinating reading - 1001 descriptions of women throughout history who succeeded in various pursuits.

(Also, above posters are correct in saying that Google's search results are based on what the algorithm finds in indexed pages.)

smadin and JunieB have already said what I wanted to, that it is not Google, but users of Google and the algorithm. If they're inputing "he invented" then that is what is most commonly being searched for...

That sounds like a great read, JunieB. I'll have to pick that up myself. :)

Also, what's wrong with D&D geeks? We're not all misogynistic teenage boys.

I tried "A Scotsman left a substantial tip" and that goddamned algorithm spat out "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Huh. It asked me "Did you mean 'A Scotswoman left a substantial tip'?".

I thought google just suggests alternatives if it doesn't find a lot of results for your particular phrase, but it finds a lot of results for a close but different phrase.

Similarly, though:
Last week I googled "stay home father" and it asked me if I meant "stay home mother"

As a twenty-something, feminist female D&D player, I just want to say that my level 6 sorceress just sent a magic missile to whoever thinks women didn't invent anything. *evil grin* Seriously, the whole idea is ludicrous. What about Hedy Lamarr? Besides being an actress, she co-invented "spread spectrum", which I guess according to Wikipedia is part of wireless communications. And that is just the first female inventor I could think of. Like others have said (very well, I might add) Google’s results are more a reflection of programming responding to gender bias in society than actual reality. Now if you excuse me, I have to go read my Monster Manual…

Last month I was looking for commentary on the WNBA draft and so googled "WNBA draft" and Google asked did you mean "NBA draft"? Um, no. I actually care more about women basketball players. Surprise!

Man, I gotta admit glancing through those Digg comments is pretty depressing.

"What did she invent? And if SHE didn't then what are the historical, social, racial, economic and gendered reasons for that?"

As today's WashPost shows, she didn't invent, achieve, lead etc. because she was told she was forced to give up her space to make room for men:

Female Would-Be Mercury Astronauts Honored

"What did she invent? And if SHE didn't then what are the historical, social, racial, economic and gendered reasons for that?"

As today's WashPost shows, she didn't invent, achieve, lead etc. because she was forced to give up her space to make room for men:

Female Would-Be Mercury Astronauts Honored

As a female computer geek, I agree that Google isn't suggesting or assuming anything. It runs on algorithms. If you searched for "aksjbdjfw" but more commonly linked-to sites say "Bksjbdjfw", the latter would be offered as a "did you mean". If you want to change the Google result, you should starting forming webpages that popularize the phrase "she invented" to the extent that the "did you mean" won't click in anymore. It'll be long and arduous, but that is the bane of pageranking and popularity algorithms.

Google is designed to be helpful. It is helpful to receive alternative search suggestions when you may have used the wrong keyword or spelling. This feature has been helpful to me countless times.

Gah.

Now what this says about Google, well I leave that to you. . .

It says nothing, since Google's search engine is a formula.

Also, as another 20-something D&D player, I find comments such as the one cleverly struck above as ignorant and childish.

Okay guys, IT'S NOT GOOGLE'S FAULT. WE ALL GET THE POINT.

Now, I think Samhita could have as easily asked: WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT WEBSITE-MAKERS, PEOPLE SEARCHING ON GOOGLE, AND OUR SOCIETY?

So in my mind, most of the post is still valid. And if you guys read through that Digg thread, it totally merited a counter blog on feministing.

Seriously, the whole idea is ludicrous. What about Hedy Lamarr? Besides being an actress, she co-invented "spread spectrum", which I guess according to Wikipedia is part of wireless communications. And that is just the first female inventor I could think of.

Isn't that what Dr. Kleiner named his pet headcrab in HL2?

Now, I think Samhita could have as easily asked: WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT WEBSITE-MAKERS, PEOPLE SEARCHING ON GOOGLE, AND OUR SOCIETY?

So in my mind, most of the post is still valid. And if you guys read through that Digg thread, it totally merited a counter blog on feministing.

Did it? I almost never use pronouns in web-searches because they're too ambiguous. I can't think of a search where adding "he" to it would be more precise. I think all that really says is some people who use search engines are dumb/illogical/inefficient, and that skews the search engine towards dumb.

As for website-makers: if you mean the folks at Google itself, the phenomena of Google-bombing should have exposed the fact that, regardless of how much better their search engine might be than others, there are some serious flaws in the site. I'm not sure what other website makers you might be talking about.

As for what it says about our society, I refer to this cartoon:
"Why can't the interwub just be informational and entertaining? Why does it got to be an experience of gut-wrenching horror and depravity?"
"The internet is an uncensored representation of the true human condition."
http://www.overcompensating.com/posts/20060923.html

So, it says our society sucks, but we knew that coming in.

I guess you can argue an angry and ignorant response here compensates for a few hundred ignorant and sexist responses over at Digg, but the fact remains this post was made in ignorance and isn't really something I'd be recommending anyone read.

I think the comparison of "woman doctor", "woman professor", and "woman lawyer" to "male nurse" is a false parallel to make.

Language is used in a context of male dominance and sex inequality so it will be used to the benefit of men. We learn to think of doctors, lawyers, scientists, and professors as male. The harmful assumption is that women aren't intelligent, hardworking, or rational enough to be in these occupations. We even unconsciously (sometimes consciously) encourage boys and young men to become scientists, doctors, and professors...to go into science and math. We tend to encourage girls and young women to go into teaching, nursing, and other service work. Since women's work is devalued in this society, nurses, teachers, secretaries, flight attendants, etc. are low-paying careers, which offer little room for advancement and most of them have a low prestige. Remember that the average nursing salary didn't go up considerably until men started entering the profession.

All of this is to say that when we refer to a doctor as a "woman doctor" we're saying that she is a doctor IN SPITE OF her gender. What we imply is that she has gone beyond what we expect of her and her "abilities" as a woman in becoming a medical professional. On the other hand, when we say "male nurse" we are implying that we do not expect men to work below their "abilities" and become nurses. After all, we all know that's a woman's job...or so the sterotype goes.

Phrases like "Male nurse" don't hurt men or reinforce harmful stereotypes about men. Rather, they reinforce the old stereotype that service jobs and jobs where you help the "real" professional (i.e. doctor) are for women. This stereotype has real world consequences. Girls are channeled into occupations that pay less and have low prestige...which leads to the wage gap. Women who do go into professions dominated by men are seen as "bitches" who likely "slept their way to the top."

In other words, for men, gender works to their benefit and for women, gender works against them. That's sounds obvious but we need to keep that in mind so we don't make inaccurate comparisons between how gender affects women and how it affects men.

It says nothing, since Google's search engine is a formula.
I agree that Google isn't suggesting or assuming anything. It runs on algorithms.

I call bullshit.

The alternate search result thing is a great feature, particularly on easily misspelled phrases. If I leave a letter off, and google catches it, and asks if I meant something else, that's one thing. "She" isn't a misspelling- it's an actual word. In the case of "She invented" you get over 2 million results. That's a pretty large number of results. Sure, "He invented" gives you more, but it's not like 2 million is a paltry number. It may be an algorithm that google uses that's causing this result... but who designed the algorithm? Did the algorithm just appear in a vacuum?

Notice that when you put in "she cooked" it doesn't make any alternate suggestion, and you get 1.6 million results. Put in "he cooked" and you get just over 3 million results, but it asks "Did you mean: he looked". "He looked" gives you 51.6 million hits. "She looked" gives you 32.7 million hits. Why didn't it ask me if I meant "she looked" when I put "she cooked"?
There are only 17 times as many results for "he looked" as for "he cooked" but there are 20 times as many results for "she looked" as "she cooked". Interesting.

Of course it's an algorithm... the question is why is the algorithm giving the results that it's giving. Even if no bias was intended, that doesn't mean that there might not be. It's certainly questionable that it suggests you mean to look for men instead of women inventing things (a stereotypically male activity) or that you didn't really mean to look for men cooking but did for women (a stereotypically female activity). It does the same damn thing with "she created" (58.8 million hits) and "she built" (56.5 million hits) and "she designed" (52.4 million hits), even though all of those result in millions of hits.

I guess I feel that being ignorant in the sense that you've never been told the technicalities of how a search engine works, and ignorant in the sense that you're a sheltered, misogynistic asshole, are two horses of a different color.

But that's just me...

Incidentally, I used to like nerds. But lately I've started to resent their often damaged ability to focus on the big picture, their general lack of real world experience, and their general obsession with innane details.

hey jacqueline - i wrote an article about hedy once. she's fantastic. made her money looking glamorous, which she described as "easy - all you have to do is stand still and look stupid" (if i remember correctly) , and then offstage tried to figure out how to win the war! (as i'm sure you know, her spread-spectrum technology was part of her wartime defense efforts.) pretty cool person.

Roy...you're all kinds of cool.

that post last was directed at datashade, btw.

roymac, you are a smart man. way to go with the questioning what people tell you, and not just accepting things uncritically

"first what did she invent?"

Well, given tool usage and invention patterns among primates, she probably invented the knife, flint and striker, hammer, lever, and wheel.

Incidentally, I used to like nerds. But lately I've started to resent their often damaged ability to focus on the big picture, their general lack of real world experience, and their general obsession with innane details.

Nina, is it possible to have a thread where you DON'T make unfair assertions about an entire group of innocent people?

I realize that this is a feminist site, but it's also a humanist site and it's inappropriate for you to constantly be casting aspersions on groups that you don't belong to.

We have many good self-proclaimed "nerds" on feministing and just because they don't think exactly like you doesn't mean that they can't see the big picture or they're focused on "innane" details.

So, in the future, please stop slagging off folks for no good reason. Thx.

The commenters on Digg.com are the dregs of the earth.

search engines don't "know" anything except how to follow rules. one rule a search engine might follow is to auto-correct a phrase to a more commonly used version of it, hence this auto-correction. a search engine could also be trained to automatically avoid auto-correcting "he" to "she", but then you're leaving up to the computer scientists to think of that, which quite innocently, they might not. have. this isn't a conspiracy, folks. it may be a reflection of actual content on the web - which, like everything else in the world - probably does have a bias towards males.

Well, because it's not been mentioned yet, I thought I should point out the recent post by Peter Norvig, How to Write a Spelling Corrector.

It explains how Google's algorithm probably works. The upshot is that it compares your search query with some corpus and determines whether you made a mis-spelling by looking at relative frequences of words in that corpus.

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess the corpus we're talking about here is "the web". A google search on "she invented" (with quotes) came up with 137,000 results. A similar search for "he invented" produced a little over 1 million hits. That might go some way to explaining the reason for it weighting one over the other.

Bear in mind however that your Google results are *always* skewed by your location. I get a lot of Dutch results even though I'm in the UK, because I go through a proxy in the Netherlands. I don't know what the comparative frequency of he/she are in Dutch ;-) but I do know that if I search for the name of my blog both from the UK or via the Netherlands I'm given different alternative suggestions. So I'd guess your locale plays a difference on the corpus they use (or the weighting of the words).

So, as a poster above mentioned, the only real way to change this is to write lots of web pages with the phrase "she invented". About 900,000 pages, in fact! :-)

As a female computer geek I'll also question the algorithm at work here – I wonder if all it is doing is seeing that there is a very similar search that has even more hits? Either way, I think it is probably highlighting web sites and web searchers biases rather than google’s (but I could be wrong not knowing a thing about the actual mechanic of their programming).

As an aside, for the second time in the last few weeks there has been an anti-gamer geek comment in a post here (“because there is nothing cuter than young gamers who already have fucked up ideas about women�). I responded last time though for some reason it wasn’t posted….but I’ll say it again in the hopes that this time it will make it thought whatever filter kept my last post out – as a site that is explicitly hoping to draw young feminists to the cause, could we please stop assuming gamers are male, teenage, misogynists? Increasing numbers of women game, especially teens. By belittling them we are doing exactly what we complain about older feminists doing.

I know this seems like a small point but I’m trying to convince some of the young teen age girls in my life that it is cool to be a feminist pointing them to feministing and this kind of thing makes them feel dismissed as potential feminists since they consider themselves hoss gamer chicks.

"Incidentally, I used to like nerds. But lately I've started to resent their often damaged ability to focus on the big picture, their general lack of real world experience, and their general obsession with innane details."

Here's why that is problematic, Nina:

Incidentally, I used to like WOMEN. But lately I've started to resent their often damaged ability to focus on the big picture, their general lack of real world experience, and their general obsession with innane details.

I wonder if all it is doing is seeing that there is a very similar search that has even more hits?

I don't know exactly how google decides when to replace "she" with "he", but it's not based solely on a comparison of which page has more results- "she conquered" and "he conquered" both give you about 1.3 million results, but it still asks if you meant "he conquered" when you put "she" instead.

A few other words that will prompt it to ask if you mean "he" instead of "she": owned, operated, loaned, hit, shot, designed, and built. Not once does it ask if you meant "she" instead of "he", even if you find times where "she" gives you tons more responses (like, for example, "gave birth" in quotes).

Erin, could we please have a thread where you weren't attacking me personally? As I recall to date you have called me (well, to paraphrase) anti-feminist, anti-male, anti-white, stupid, crazy, and a horrible sister/daughter/lover.

A lot of people would call me a nerd. And as I recall this is the first time on feministing I've made a generalizing statement about a group of people like that (well, unless you're counting the time I knocked fratboy culture). And I said it was a generalizing statement. Doesn't mean I wasn't referring to a trend that actually exists.

Interesting results roymacIII. It doesn't make any of those suggestions for me, but still does for "she invented". What are everyone's locations?

(A thought just came to mind: I wonder if it adapts to search history, ie, if everyone continues to "verify" this claim it'll eventually go away because no-one will click-through the suggestion?)

http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html

Here is a page everyone should check out to understand what is going on.

The numbers next to each phrase searched for (in this case, alterations of 'britney spears'), represent how many times that key phrase was typed into Google Search. Based on the most popular search, 'britney spears', if this phrase is typed into Google Search, there won't be any suggestions from google (since it is the most popular). On the other hand, if any of the other alterations are typed into Google Search, the suggestion will be the most popular, 'britney spears'.

If analyzing the 'she invented' phenomena, 'he invented' would be the most popular searched phrase that deviates one letter from it. Google's search algorithm looks for the most popular searched term and will suggest it to the user. This is why 'he searched' comes up as a suggestion for 'she searched', 'he looked' comes up for 'he cooked', and when searching for 'she cooked' no suggestions come up because it is the most popular searched term (with no other deviating searches that are more popular).

If that makes sense..

I just tried:

She gave birth

He gave birth

The latter of the two came up with more hits....

These type of thing really annoy me when it comes to "invention" in particular as so much revisionism occurs, and there is often other 'isms involved.

Here's a pair considered facts in our classrooms. Henry Ford invented the assembly line and Sam Colt invented interchageable parts. No both were in use in China THOUSANDS of years before.

I'd just like to put up another polite request to cease and desist with the negative stereotyping of gamers as misogynist males who never get laid. Do you not usually agree that women (and genuinely egalitarian men) trying to carve out a place for themselves in a male-dominated career or hobby deserve support?

I'm not surprised that "he gave birth" came up with so many more hits. Male pregnancy is a huge deal in fan fiction.

Speaking of inventors and geeks, I wonder how Sandra Lerner feels about the Google algorithm. Google her!

EG -
I've heard of slash, but that is just creepy. *shudder*

Ithika: Weird. I'm still getting the same results.

mizza: Hmm. It's interesting, though, because that list is full of complete misspellings. If you search for Britain Spears, it doesn't suggest "Britney Spears" even though Britney Spears is almost certainly a more popular search, and has roughly 30 times more results. Even replacing Britney with other real words that should yield far fewer results doesn't prompt the "Did you mean:" option- Breath, breathy, Britain, Britannia, Pithy, Piney, Printy, Printly.

Even if it's what you're suggesting- which it very well may be- I think it's still problematic, even if unintentional. "She" is only one letter different from "he" and I hope that, now that the unfortunate results have been noticed, I hope that google takes some steps to prevent this quirk from continuing.

i suspect that the issue is also that women invent things in undocumented times and arenas. Given the division of labour around gender lines 10,000 years or so ago, I wonder about bread. Given that Ninkasi was a FEMALE deity, I wonder about beer, and the hymn to Ninkasi.
http://www.piney.com/BabNinkasi.html

It seems that they would be related.

I don't really deal much with search algorithms, but I do deal with history and continuing behavioural trends.

This reminds me of a similar situation in which I was TAing for a class and had to grade the students' lab reports.

The students had certain articles that they needed to cite in their paper, and discuss them throughout. An author of one paper (she's a front-runner in her field and publishes countless articles every year) was mistakenly quoted as "he" by a student when discussing her research. I guess it's just too hard to read the actual article and look up that pertinent information. I just love blatant assumptions on stuff like this.

heee-yah. let's hold up one second and back on up off teh Goog.

I do deal with search engines, and this is not attributable to Google--sorry all, it's much scarier and pervasive than that. Google is an algorithm. It uses a complicated mathematical formula that takes into account the number of links to and from a site, the actual url of the site, the coding of the site, the search indicators (such as meta tags), and--here's the scary part--the content of the page in relation to the keyword searched upon. There are not many sites that contain the keyword phrase "she invented" (check the Googlefight, if you don't believe me). That's NOT Google's fault. It's simply dredging up what's there and sorting it in order of relevance (primarily, the number of links to the site and the number of instances of "she invented" and other relevant phrases).

I'm not saying that this doesn't perpetuate the idea that women don't invent--or do much in traditionally male-gendered fields overall--but that it stems from something larger. Interestingly enough, railing about it on this site is actually doing something. If this page includes enough incidences of the keyword "she invented," it will rise up among the search results and give the searcher what for.

I'd like to encourage everyone to take a gander, though, at just what Google is SHOWING that people are saying that "she invented," and then go back to your blogs and write a post about a female inventor, link it all over the place, and get her out there.

It is similar to saying male nurse. Certain work is assumed to be done by a certain genders so it surprises us when the wrong gender is doing the wrong work and it must be named, with he, she, male or female.

I just wanted to make a comment on this: I've been guilty of this kind of thing too. I think it's important to call people on it when it happens, though. It's easy- particularly when something is dominated by a particular sex- to use qualifiers like "male" or "female," but doing so just further solidifies and encourages the distinction between "male" and "female" occupations. From my own example: It was wrong to say that Wonder Woman is "the foremost woman warrior in DC comics" when, in truth, she's one of the foremost warriors, period. Her being a woman is completely beside the point- she kicks total ass, and her being a woman has no bearing on that.

I think this is definitely a result in inherent bias in language. Besides, weren't there lots of inventions attributed to males that historians believe were actually invented by women? The vacuum cleaner rings a bell, but I'm not completely sure.

If you add in stories like that of the Mercury 13, and the role that stealing Rosalind Franklin's work had in the discovery of DNA, I think there's pretty clear evidence that one of the reasons the bias exists is that women's contributions have been erased through history. That's what we have to work on.

However, if you do a search on "female inventors," which is clearly far more useful for research purposes, Google doesn't suggest "male inventors." It also gives you less shitty garbage on the first page; the second link is Hedy Lamarr.

It's not a formula, and we shouldn't back off google.

It does the same thing if you google "she created" or "she engineered" or "she developed." If there's a "formula" at work here, why does it only call out searches suggesting a woman doing something technical in nature?

(Notice that "she wrote" or "she said" are not treated equally.)

I'm not so sure it's purely algorithmic either. Those formulas and algorithms are written by humans, by the by.
If you put in "she discovered radium" (ref Ms. Curie) it DOES come back with "do you mean HE discovered radium?"
And what's really insane is if you put in "he menstruated," it does NOT come back with "do you mean SHE menstruated," just 43,600 hits for "he menstruated."

ghostorchid:

I was just being uber-sarcastic, okay? I felt like people were attacking Samhita unjustifiably.

To that end, I think roymac has raised some great points as well...

Goodness, are there people working for Google commenting on this site? Why are people attacking me so much?

And thanks for all the arrogant comments. I am familiar with how Google search engines work but I think my question was just trying to get at whether the person developing the algorithm potentially has this bias, or if it is indicative of the greater internet and lack of posts. I think it is both.

Why are people taking that so personally?

The rest of my post is still completely valid. And sorry if I insulted any D&D teenagers, I know a lot of people who play D&D and RPGs and they are very special in that special kind of way.In fact I love RPGs. But did anyone read the comments on Digg? I was trying to be sarcastic because if I took them seriously I would throw my computer away.

Vervain, male pregnancy is just the tip of the fan fiction iceberg when it comes to stuff that will ick people right out!

You know, Roy, I take your point, but I think it is also important to point out that Wonder Woman, for example, is the foremost female warrior in the DC universe, because when I was a girl and now as a woman, I was excited about her because she was a woman warrior. That is why she was a hero for me--if she had just been yet another muscleman in a cape, I wouldn't have been interested in reading about her. It was her femaleness that made her a role model for me.

Roy, the algorithm isn't necessary limited to # of results. The algorithm could also take into account the # of requests.

Therefore, even if "he conquered" and "she conquered" have the same # of results, if 10 times more people searched for "he conquered", that could easily be the source of the proferred "correction".

Nina, I don't see how asking you not to slag off nerds is attacking you personally, but have it your way. I certainly have not called you those other things either, but you do so enjoy making up things so you may play the victim. The funny thing is, YOU called ME "anti-women", but you don't see me whining about it....

Re: Sarcasm, it is always hard to tell sarcasm from non-sarcasm online. That said, we probably wouldn't be amused if people were sarcastic in a similar manner towards, oh, say 'women' or 'blacks' or something, so it's a good idea to be aware of who you might be legitimately offending before you go after nerds, D&D players, and/or gamers. That's my 2 cents. :)

To answer one of the questions in the original post, "what did SHE invent", I am forever indebted to the inventor of one of the best inventions of all time: the automatic dishwasher.

Josephine Cochrane invented the automatic dishwasher in 1886. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Cochrane

Erin:

"it's inappropriate for you to constantly be casting aspersions on groups that you don't belong to."

-That sounds like a generalizing statement to me.

Erin, I guess part of the reason I thought your extreme response was related to more than just the nerd comment might be the fact that it included the above statement, and the fact that the nerd comment was obviously directed at Datashade, who was calling Samhita "ignorant" over a technicality.

I didn't call you anti-women. I don't think you are, seeing as you consider yourself a feminist. I would perhaps say I perceive you as having this strange tendency to trust men more/be more defensive of men than women in cases when we do not know the 100% truth about everything that has happened. Also you've supported people making statements such as "sexism [against women] doesn't exist", just because they disagreed with something you also disagreed with (i.e. Richard Aubrey). But maybe it's just because you feel you have to defend feminism against men, since you keep bringing up concerns about me being the wrong kind of feminist that gives feminism a bad name. (I mean, to whom does feminism have a bad name? Not most of the people on this site...)

"I certainly have not called you those other things either"

Well, "sexist" and "racist", "stupid or crazy" are direct quotes. But the others I guess I sort of inferred.

But really, this thread isn't about personal stuff. So I won't keep this going if you wont'.

"Re: Sarcasm, it is always hard to tell sarcasm from non-sarcasm online. That said, we probably wouldn't be amused if people were sarcastic in a similar manner towards, oh, say 'women' or 'blacks' or something"

If you replace Samhita's sarcasm towards D&D players with the stereotypes that would /usually/ be directed at women, the feministers (that would be the noun, right?) might not like it, but a lot of other people wouldn't even notice anything was wrong.

To me this poses an interesting question: We don't want to be called hypocrits, but why must we censor ourselves most heavily all the time? Is it not alright to sometimes fight fire with fire? Is it not alright to sometimes acknowledge your biases? (and since when is calling someone misogynistic the same as calling someone the type of negative stereotype usually reserved for women and blacks? My cousin got very offended a few months ago when I called a comment he made misogynistic. I mean, isn't misogynistic a term used to analyze a social phenomenon? When people who are behaving misogynistically simultaneously consider you rude for calling their behavior misogynistic, feminism is in some trouble I'm afraid. When saying that some person's attitude is endangering the well-being of a group of people becomes an insult in and of itself, how are we going to talk about these things? If someone accuses me of having a bias, it's usually cause for me to be introspective (not necessarily to ultimately agree with them, but at least to consider it)

I realize this isn't all related to what Samhita was saying, but it's just something I thought of...

Is it not alright to sometimes fight fire with fire?

Ghandi would disagree.

"Two wrongs don't make a right." Or, if you prefer, "An eye for an eye so that the whole word may be blind."

You will never convince society that aspersions on women are NOT funny and are actually inappropriate when you wish to claim the same rights for yourself.

With all due respect to Ghandi, you are never going to succeed in erasing biased statements completely from the world. To me this is maybe similar to the violence debate that was on here a couple weeks ago: violence is not necessarily right ever, but it would be foolish to deny it doesn't give the user power.

Also, if feminists succeed in completely erasing bias from their language (and truly, I don't believe that's possible) would the rest of society then take them seriously? Something tells me that's not the barrier to the rest of society taking them seriously, maybe not even a significant barrier...

Oops, that should have been "but it would be foolish to deny it /gives/ the user power."

I would suggest that the reason that Google so often suggests "he" as a replacement for "she" is that "he" is a substring of "she" and thus any "he x" search should return results for both "he x" and s"he x" and thus is preferable to the search engine.

but counterspin, there are other cases in which it does not return "she". We basically haven't come up with one single programming mechanism that could account for all of the weird search results, I don't think...

Hmm, I did miss some of the additional instances in the comments. I still find it highly unlikely that somewhere in google's algorithm there's a cog whose job is to say insulting things about women. I find it more likely that this is an artifact of institutionalized discrimination, reflecting that, to use an instance given, "stay at home mothers" is a much more common search than "stay at home fathers."

EG: I think it's great if an individual says "Wonder Woman was a role model to me because she was a woman who kicked ass and did so on the same level as someone like Superman," but I think that Jaclyn's point on my blog was absolutely right- in the context of talking about Wonder Woman in general, why did I choose to remark that she was "a woman warrior" instead of just "a warrior"? I wouldn't have remarked that, say, Thor (from Marvel) was "a male warrior," because his being a male is probably beside the point. In regards to my discussion of Wonder Woman's costume, the fact that she's a woman shouldn't matter- it's the fact that she's a warrior that is important. We do this with "male nurse" or "female politician" etc, and I think that it's true, it reinforces the idea that her status as "woman" is somehow more important than her status as "warrior" and I'm not sure that's the case.

Nina: If you replace Samhita's sarcasm towards D&D players with the stereotypes that would /usually/ be directed at women, the feministers (that would be the noun, right?) might not like it, but a lot of other people wouldn't even notice anything was wrong.

Which, as I see it, is one of the things we try to change, right? We want people to recognize sexism as a problem. We want people to understand that using terms like "sissy" or "pussy" to describe bad things is harmful to women, and is a problem, right?

why must we censor ourselves most heavily all the time?

I don't think it's censoring ourselves to not deride people for things that aren't a problem. It's like the feministe thread about fat shaming. The Sadly!No guys got called out (rightly) for using someone's weight as a weapon. Calling out and deriding misogyny is great. Calling out someone's sexual orientation? Not great. Calling out someone's racism? Great. Calling out someone's geekiness? Not great.

If we're trying to end unfair oppression, I don't think it's fair to throw other people under the bus. It reminds of what Jessica said in her book about how NOW started off distancing themselves from the homosexual community, and how wrong and hurtful that was. I don't think it'd be fair to do that to geeks, or punks, or whatever other group you want to pick out. I think we've got enough legitimate complaints about misogynists that we can go after them without hitting unintentional targets along the way.

"The Sadly!No guys got called out (rightly) for using someone's weight as a weapon. Calling out and deriding misogyny is great. Calling out someone's sexual orientation? Not great. Calling out someone's racism? Great. Calling out someone's geekiness? Not great."

I'm not so much defending the use of generalizing statements which put someone down, as I am trying to question some things theoretically.

Like why has much of society come to consider "misogynist" to be an insult on par with a racial slur. (maybe it doesn't, that is just my perception). Misogynist is a term meant to describe a very specific kind of attitude, moreso than it is a comment on the person's identity itself, I feel. And then if you call someone's comments misogynistic, and they respond with indignation like you just threw a huge insult at them, what does that do to debate? And I'm thinking specifically of talking with an individual here, I guess, so in that sense it's different than Samhita's post.

But I think we can expand this out a bit. Most people on this site are okay with the statement "our society is misogynistic". So why is it then, that calling parts of society (such as groups of people misogynistic), is wrong? It's not any more generalizing than the "our society is misogynistic" statement. I'm basically focusing on the way language is used here, I guess. Because I do think misogyny is probably a word that's use has changed some since it was invented. I've just noticed that anytime anyone calls much of anything misogynistic on this website (short of actual violence) many people come on to defend, and to get so offended about what the term connotes. (whereas I doubt people 30 or 40 years ago considered misogynistic or its meanings to be a horrible personal insult along the lines of calling someone a slur, but maybe I'm wrong) I'm suggesting we've got some sort of phenomenon on our hands, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about it...

Try "He kissed" and "She Kissed." Apparently women are only sex toys...

good call scarbo. Although with all the discussion regarding Google and search algorithms, I'd feel remiss (and my Mom would be quite unahppy with me) if I failed to mention Ada Byron (aka Ada Lovelace) the "inventor" of the first computer program. Tres cool, if you ask me.

The google algorithm is not gender biased, as has been pointed out repeatedly. If there were about 800,000 more web pages that used the exact phrase "she invented", Google would ask you if that was what you meant.

Why do 800,000 more pages say "he invented"? Well, I think we can safely assume that it's not a google-bombing campaign by the patriachal conspiracy. Odds are, the phrases appear in pages that are talking about either inventors or inventions, and the vast majority of those pages represent male inventors or or inventions by them.

Now, is this just cultural male bias, only things invented by men are worthy of their own web page, or is there a systematic historical tilt in the balance between male and female inventors?

The distinction is significant, the first indicates an ongoing cultural inequity, the second only represents the shadow of past inequities (much as a listing of all the English monarchs would be heavily male, even thought the current monarch is Queen Elizabeth II).

As for the term "misogynist", if you say that someone is "one who hates women", yes, they're going to get a little defensive. I don't think the meaning of the word has changed, just the cultural loading of being such a person.

It's a term intended to marginalize the viewpoints of those it is aimed at, if you're a mysogynist, anything you have to say about women is motivated by hatred of the gender, and therefore of such extreme bias as to be immediately dismissed. It's less accurate and more loaded than the term it replaced, "male chauvinist" And it's thrown around very freely.

--Dave

Dave Rickey,

Re: The Google stuff. Roymac has raised some very interesting questions regarding that explanation. I suggest you go through and read his posts.

The problem isn't that google brings up "did you mean he invented" when you search for results on "she invented," but rather that a search result on "he invented" doesn't bring up "did you mean she invented". The problem is a glitch in the system, and it was not planted there by misogynist (or was it?), but is due to the fact the "he" is the pronoun used when the sex is unknown, which is an inherently sexist quality in the English language.
Unfortunately it will probably take centuries to get past all that.

but Ranter,

There doesn't seem to be any logic to when google suggests "he" instead of "she" and when it doesn't. If you read through people's posts they talk about that.

Do you really think it was an act of The misogny on the part of the people at google?
I am not doubting you, but I think rather it is a glitch caused by the English language, or at least I hope it is.

It may be a glitch, it's just that nobody has been able to explain how the darn thing actually works and have all of the weird search results support their explanation

It could also be because she shortens to he, but she does not shorten to she, when suggesting subsitutes. In any case google needs to fix their engine.

but then why does google suggest "he" for things like "she invents" but does not suggest "he" for things like "she writes"? The difference in the number of results is larger for the latter than the former.

Do you really think it was an act of The misogny on the part of the people at google?
I am not doubting you, but I think rather it is a glitch caused by the English language, or at least I hope it is.

Actually, I don't think it is malicious code at all. I think it's probably a quirk of whatever algorithms they're using. It may be a result of unintentional bias on the part of the people who designed the code, or it might just be a quirk of the way the system works. We don't know for sure, because nobody who knows has come out to explain why the results are what they are, for sure. My guess is that it's not intentional.

Thanks, roymacIII. :)

Samhita: apology accepted. For venting your anger about ignorant misogynist posters, may I suggest bringing up the subject of their poor hygiene? Perhaps something to the effect of "...and the pimply mouth-breathing louts who live in fear of soap heaved themselves off of their food-stained couches long enough to spew their input..."

While it's true that most people who don't wash are poorly socialized males, and such males still make up a considerable chunk of the gaming community, it's pointing out something that is indisputably a disgusting behaviour, rather than a harmless and creative hobby.

Ninapendamaishi: There's nothing to explain, of the alternatives Google's algorithm is considering, "he looked" is the one with the most pages, so it's what is offered.

Not sure if Google weights that with the "Page Rank" system they use to keep the most linked page from automatically being the top search result. But I've never seen *any* indication that Google weights words differently, or does any parsing of them at all (I doubt they would, since the Google algorithm works on any arbitrary language).

I use a gaming pseudonym that is a one-letter variant of a character name from a sci-fi novel. Until recently, I had more pages under that name than the original name, and typing the right name would ask if you meant my spelling. I haven't used that name publicly in a long time, and it no longer does that, now it asks if you meant the original spelling when you use my character name.

You could probably use relative number of Google hit to make some pretty good analysis of language bias as actually used, and that's what you're seeing. But looking for bias in the actual algorithm is almost certainly a waste of time.

--Dave

Dave, you're still missing the point, and your analysis is still lacking.

1. Even if google didn't have malicious intentions or if this is just a random quirk of the way the system parses a query, it's still something that should probably be avoided.
2. On "he" pages having more results than "she" pages- sure. Why does it only do it for some pages and not for others? Why is it suggesting "Did you mean: he conquered" when you put she conquered as your search term? There's less than a hundred thousand result difference between the two, but it still asks if I meant "he" in that case.
But, if you use "battle" with both pronouns, there's a little over a hundred thousand result difference, and it doesn't ask. And prepared has a thirty million result difference and doesn't ask.

Again: I'm not suggesting that this is something intentional on google's part, I'm just saying that it's problematic, and that it's something that, now that it's been noticed, should be fixed.

"It's a term intended to marginalize the viewpoints of those it is aimed at, if you're a mysogynist, anything you have to say about women is motivated by hatred of the gender, and therefore of such extreme bias as to be immediately dismissed. It's less accurate and more loaded than the term it replaced, "male chauvinist" And it's thrown around very freely."

Male chauvanist means a similar thing as misogynist, if you ask me.

But I mean, back to the whole "since when does calling someone a misogynist make the person using the word an inherently rude person?", thing. When someone uses the word "misandrist" it doesn't have the same effect... If you call someone a "misandrist" she's most likely going to reply something to the effect of "I don't think I am". But she's not going to get offended the same way as if you called her by one of the slurs usually used to put-down women...

Misogyny is not a comment on someone's /identity/ it's a comment on how you perceive their attitude. And well, maybe calling someone a /misogynist/ is a little bit strong. But just calling something they say or do misogynistic? I mean if we can't comment on how we perceive people's attitudes without it being an inherent insult, how is anything ever going to change? If people don't want to think they are misogynists, shouldn't the term be the opening for a dialogue, instead of the closing of one?

(Does anyone see where I'm coming from here, or am I talking to myself? I do that sometimes...)

I have to say I'm also put off by that slam at gamers. I read through the Digg comments and many of them were offensive and idiotic, though not significantly more so than any other large group of semi-anonymous comments. Clearly the comments are both misogynistic and immature, but the D&D bit is just invoking an off-topic stereotype.

Nina: You seem to be framing the questions as essentially "They slam us, why do we have to be careful not to slam them back.?" Aside from it being a poor choice to use "they started it" as a reason to paint a large group of people with the same brush, it's not a matter of us vs. them.

I'm a woman, a feminist and a gamer, as are many of my friends. I'll agree that gaming is a male-dominated hobby, though not all of them are teenagers, or misogynists. (For instance my husband also reads Feministing. Hi, honey.) The attitude that gaming is a hobby for boys, marginalizing and ignoring that large numbers of women that participate, is an attitude I'd think we'd be fighting not propagating.

I have a craaaazy idea.
If google isn't getting enough hits with phrases such as "she led/succeeded/invented/created" why don't those of us w/ webpages/blogs write about some of the women that inspire us and add to the number of times these phrases come up? As I mentioned on my blog, I know this isn't our duty, necessarily, but where is the wrong? we'd be adding to public knowledge and passing along stories of the women who inspired us, which is an awesome amazing thing, imo.

Cheers!

"You seem to be framing the questions as essentially "They slam us, why do we have to be careful not to slam them back.?"

No. That was maybe like the first question I asked, but that wasn't the point of my most recent post.

Hey- try this:
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=He+&word2=She+

Even just searching for he and she... shows you how underrepresented just the pronoun is in and of itself.

Please excuse me, I hope that two quick remarks from a stranger won't be taken as excessively impolite. Certainly, it's not my intention to be crassly argumentative in a forum dedicated to the promotion of equality and social justice.

So, about the algorithms Google uses: While it is certainly and irrefutably true that "she invented" suggesting "he invented" is indicative of multiple levels of both historical and contemporary sexism, it's not feasible to suppose that Google's staff is in some way actively collaborating with that sexism. The algorithms the Google uses aren't of the sort where simple rules are embedded into the code, such as "If someone types 'she invented' then suggest 'he invented'."

Rather, they're sentential co-occurrence algorithms that say something like "If the statistical likelihood of words A and B appearing next to each other on the 5 billion web-pages indexed by our cache is significantly less than the statistical likelihood of words A and C (where C is a possible misspelling or typographical error of B) appearing next to each other on those same web-pages, then suggest A and C as a possible alternative to A and B."

Since the words "he invented" appear much more often than "she invented" across the web, and since "she" is a one character difference from "he" Google suggests the alternative.

Of course, I realize that the fact of "he invented" appearing so much more than "she invented" is in itself reflective of both historical sexism and contemporary sexism. And that's a shame, and certainly is worth doing something about. I'm not trying to say that the situation is not sexist - it is. I'm just saying that it has nothing to do with Google using a sexist algorithm; the algorithms Google uses don't have the words "he" or "she" anywhere in them. Instead, Google is revealing the extant sexism that's already a well-documented contemporary and historical fact.

Oh, and second, I'm 28, a graduate linguistic anthropology student dating a women's-rights lawyer, consider myself a a feminist, and I play Dungeons and Dragons. I rather resent the aspersions directed at my hobby in your original post.

That said, great website! I'll have to read it more often :)

Whoops. Guess I made that one a little link-heavy. Sorry mods.

I’d argue there’s a place for calling you a “woman blogger� or a “female blogger� - namely, when the fact that you’re female is relevant. If someone’s going to comment on issues of gender and sexism, I’d like to know if that person is male or female (or queer or what have you). If a person’s going to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’d like to know if that person happens to be Israeli or Palestinian. It helps me to better interpret what they’re saying. Sure, there’s a normative element at work here – if I know you’re male, I’ll be starting from certain initial assumptions about you as a member of the general category “male� – but there’s value, too. For example, I’m going to be a lot less skeptical about a woman talking about menstruating than I would be about a man. I think the danger, and the slide into sexist language, comes when those initial assumptions are taken as fact.

The American:

"Rather, they're sentential co-occurrence algorithms that say something like "If the statistical likelihood of words A and B appearing next to each other on the 5 billion web-pages indexed by our cache is significantly less than the statistical likelihood of words A and C (where C is a possible misspelling or typographical error of B) appearing next to each other on those same web-pages, then suggest A and C as a possible alternative to A and B.""

I don't have a problem with strangers commenting on threads. I just wish they'd bother to read most of the other posts first... Someone has also pointed out that the likelihood of "he wrote" appearing on a page is much higher than "she wrote," yet when you type in "she wrote" it doesn't suggest "he wrote". There are a bunch more questions like that raised above...

"she created" also suggest "he created, but She sang gives no suggestion.

She cooked, she died, she loved, she saved, she made, she killed, she plotted, all did not bring up "he", but she preached did.

One of my favorite things invented by a woman is the overhead boom mike, invented by Dorothy Arzner.

She directed, and she lead also suggested he. I don't see a pattern here, but it doesn't seem like there is a reason why any search for "she" should defaults to "he". Google needs to fix this.

A long list of google searchs with "he" followed a verb (including he menstruated) did not produce a suggection for "she".

You're right, I hadn't read the other comments, and was just providing a simplified explanation. Which, you are correct, is insufficient to cover all the quirks of the search engine.

For what it's worth, the simplified version of why "he gave birth" (for example) doesn't produce "she gave birth" is that the probability that Google offers any spelling suggestions for a string of letters that constitutes a recognizable common word decreases dramatically the shorter the string is. It's far more likely, in short, to offer corrections for "she" than for "he" simply because "he" is shorter. The decrease in probability is drastic, and the shorter the string, the faster it decreases. Recognizable 2-letter words have a baseline probability of being replaced that is much lower than that of 3-letter words. Note that baseline probabilities are affected by weighting from training data. For illustrations of this, try, searching for "the first man IN the moon" (no suggestion) or "IN not, on the other hand" (no suggestions) or "finally, AS long last" or even "HE became the first woman in history to".

Again, this is about baseline probabilities, subject to changes by quirks in training data. And there are other factors too, of course.

An explanation that would be sufficient to answer all the "why" questions a person could raise about the behavior of a piece of pattern-recognition software as complex as Google's search engine is not going to be reducible to a blurb on a forum. So, here's a relatively informative article on automated spell-checking in general: http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~roger/spellchecking.html

And here's a very popular recent article on norvig.com that elaborates on exactly how to build an algorithm out of that basic theory:
http://www.norvig.com/spell-correct.html

But really the crux of the quirks is going to reside in Google's training data (information about what users have and have not searched for in the past, whether those searches resulted in certain types of user behavior, etc.) and how that data is weighted. They've got one of the world's most sophisticated machine-learning systems processing everything that gets typed into the search bar, including countless "he"s and "she"s in countless contexts. It's not going to have anything to do, in terms of the internal architecture of the program, with anything to do with sex or gender.

For those who want some serious quirkiness, try "She became the first man in history to lead a nation" (no suggestions) or "she worked himself to death" (no suggestions) or "she became king" (no suggestions).

I believe that Google also takes into consideration how often people search for a phrase. I wouldn't be surprised if "he invented" is more commonly searched for since most of our famous inventors were men.

But for a wonderful female inventor, how about Hypatia. A) She lived in Ancient Greece, and became a successful scientist (no mean feat for a woman in that era). B) She invented the hydroscope and astrolabe, both of which were enormous breakthrougs,. C) She was literally the last scientist of the golden age of Greece. She was killed by a group of monks who were upset that she cared more about science and truth than her "soul".

Er... hydrometer, not hydroscope.

Well, let's see:

From Yahoo:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22she+invented%22&ei=utf-8&fr=b2ie7

to

http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/hyde.html

Ida Henrietta Hyde [.....] invented the microelectrode, a device used to deliver electrical or chemical stimuli to a cell and to record the electrical activity from an individual cell. The microelectrode has been said to have revolutionized neurophysiology.

EG -
I just know I'm going to regret asking this....

When fanfic males give birth, from what, erm, orifice does the newborn emerge?

I was directed here, interestingly enough, from the text attached to Penny Arcade. I read through a few of the articles and then got to your needless D&D slur.

I'm a little amused that a self-appointed feminist blogger just used the same arguing techniques as all the kiddies on any gaming forum from here to the moon. "OMG u play d&d ur a looser who lives in ur momz basement," i.e. discrediting an argment by insulting the user. Incidentally, using the D&D appelation implies that the writer is such a geek that he (because only males play D&D, right? I'd best stop playing my half-giant psionic warrior, then) will never have sex. Congrats, you've just used having sex with a woman as a mark of maturity and validity of argument. I wonder what that says about you.

Since you can't rise above that level of rhetoric, regardless of your intent, this is the first and last time I read this blog. Oh, but be prepared for the penny arcade traffic. We're a bored lot.

Actually, Grumpy_Gamer, the only one who introduced a connection between sex and D&D was you. I wonder what that says about you?

*shrug*

I read Penny Arcade, and I think it's pretty clear that I'm a fan of this site. The offending phrase has been struck out.

Okay, since I can't get the trackback to work, I have a post up on women inventors.
http://thesoggyliberal.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/she-invented/