Its 3014, and we have achieved gender equality…

[Thistledew]

Men and women are seen as true equals. They are equally represented in positions of power; there is no pay gap; there is no differentiation or stigma in terms of job roles, hobbies or in respect of domestic responsibilities. Men and women are seen as equally capable of and responsible for all aspects of child-raising (apart from breast feeding). The way people choose to dress and behave is completely fluid, with things like clothing, personal grooming and wearing of makeup seen as being solely the choice of the individual. Gender based violence is seen as primitive behaviour, beyond which the human race has now evolved.

Do we still have a need for gender designation?

The biological function of reproduction still throws up obvious gender differentials. Assuming that we still largely operate in a pair-bonding system, both expectant parents would have the same rights to take time off work to attend ante-natal appointments, to take time off after the birth to care for the post-natal care, and to flexibility in employment for care for children, the disabled and the elderly.

However, it does not make sense for all employment rights to be equal. For example, the right to be able to avoid heavy lifting, long hours standing up, exposure to chemicals etc only applies to those people who are actually pregnant with the child, and not the non-pregnant partner. Is it still therefore useful to designate people as ‘men’ and ‘women’, as a short hand to saying “women are entitled to additional pregnancy-related employment rights”, or would it be sufficient to say “these employment rights apply to anyone with medical proof of pregnancy”?

Could we do away with male/female designation altogether, on birth certificates, employment records and other official documents?

Is competitive sport the only time at which it would be unfair not to differentiate?

NB I’m not saying that doing away with gender designation would bring about proper equality, which I think has to come first before we can be truly gender neutral. This may be a completely pointless musing, but I thought it might be a fresh way to consider gender and what it actually is.

NB ii. It may be 3014, but we still don’t have hover boards. Sorry.

Good question.

I'll wander off muttering and harumphing about the lack of hover boards and mull it over.

The things you need to avoid due to pregnancy are similar (except the avoidance of chemicals) to things you might need to avoid due to some illnesses so basically 'at risk individuals'. So documentation could be worded from that perspective. In fact (as someone who has had to fill in quite a few risk and COSHH assessments) even the aviodance of chemicals don't need to be couched in gender terms. Just 'list risk phrases' then 'proposed mitigation of risks', a common one at work is 'inform others working in the vicinity of additional risks associated with experiment'.

Actually all pregnancy stuff should be non-genderised since the partner of the mother does not have to be male even now in 2014.

I'm sure the words for the different sexes will still be used, but hopefully far less than now, in the same way as racial terms aren't used as much as they were historically (anyone read a book written in the last 10 years with a 'Jewess' as a character, plenty of Victorian novels do!).

Is competitive sport the only time at which it would be unfair not to differentiate?

Wouldn't need to be. You could 'handicap' most sports based on stats. You won your last five races, you start five metres back (stupid example but YSWIM).

I've often wondered if we really need gendered pronouns in language. Shouldn't there just be one word instead of he/she?
Doesn't having two different words only facilitate gender discrimination?

I wonder if there will even still be employment in 3014, actually, DH reckons they're developing replicators now which will eventually negate the need for money/trade as an essential for survival. Then either some narcissist/power hungry people will find some other way to be on top just because, or our world and lives will look totally different as people won't have to work to survive any more, people can work if and how they want to.

Aren't competitive sports a bit of a weird thing anyway? DS loves to run and says that when he grows up he's going to be The Flash. He likes to "use" his "super speed" for purposes like running to press the door of the train to keep it waiting for an extra few seconds or giving us a head start at the traffic lights, etc. It strikes me that being the fastest person on the planet could be pretty useful, transport in areas where transport is hard to use, etc. But no, instead their entire job is training and competing in expensive tournaments, to no end at all except that they get to introduce themselves as the fastest person in the world.

(Sorry, going really utterly off topic here but just a musing I had. As you were!)

I like to think that either women will have caught up with men in most physical sports (the gap is closing for most), or will be receiving equal training (eg football) which will render them equally capable, or sports in which women have the physical advantage will have evolved and be as popular as sports in which men have the physical advantage, so no, there will be no gendered competitive sports either. People will just be able to compete in the sport which best suits their personal physicality, with all sports getting equal recognition/prize money. I mean, different nationalities/races tend towards physicalities which predispose them towards different sports, but no-one thinks we should have different sports leagues for different races, such as black and white basketball leagues, do they?

So, yes, I like to think that despite the lack of hoverboards, gender will be irrelevant, and can be disregarded. The same was as sexual orientation, people can just ask each other when it becomes relevant to pairing up, and health and safety can just be applied as and when medical conditions, including pregnancy, come up.

I read a book once where people had all become virtual, so no physical bodies any more and everyone lived in the internet (as most of us do now anyway!). So with physical bodies no longer being a physical factor, people could choose to identify as male or female with the associated gendered pronouns, or they could remain neutral and the pronouns ve was used.

I thought this was fantastic - in Sweden they are introducing gender-neutrality into nursery schools, including a gender-neutral pronoun.

how interesting kulam. after all, we only distinguish sex in the third person singular (in english), but of course in languages where they also distinguish the third person plural (leaving aside adjectival agreement) the masculine is the default where both sexes are referred to. these things always give clues to a society's underlying structure, like in quechua where they distinguish between we (me/us and you - inclusive) and we (us but not you - exclusive)

I do sometimes wonder what hope there is for true gender equality in cultures where everything down to the frikkin' curtains and cockroaches are gendered. It would take a huge shift and a complete re-structuring of the language.

I also often wonder who got to decide the gender of tables, street-lights and the moon.

Slightly o/t but reading kulam's link- m&s are making their toy labelling gender neutral?

I was looking on line for a gruffalo lunch bag dd wants for Christmas. It's in the "younger boys" section. "Girls" contain fluffy bunnies.

i have never analysed this from a feminist POV, but my understanding of grammatical gender is that the words themselves are not felt to have masculine or feminine attributes semantically as we would understand them in relation to the stereotypes of a man or a woman, unless you are actually talking about a person or animal that is male/female. so a table is not seen to be feminine, the word is feminine grammatically. nouns traditionally applied to men may well be feminine-gendered words. much of it relates to groups of words, so if they have the same ending, so in french, nouns ending in -tion are feminine, as are those ending -ence (like "patience", "violence"). also based on their origin, so in french words with greek origin (instead of latin) will i believe tend to be masculine-gendered, so "problème" and "thème" are masculine

(that said, my french teacher used the memory aid "problems are masculine, solutions are feminine" to remind us which endings were of which gender )

however, this is based only on my language knowledge, not on any feminist analysis, and i'd be really interested to see what exploration has been done by someone who actually knows what they're talking about

I've always wondered about certain words. La Radio in Italian. Why does that one have an 'o' ending and is female? Why? There is a male example as well but I can't remember it.

Radio is feminine in French because it is short for radiophonie, which is feminine

Telephone, on the other hand, is masculine in French.

I believe (but please do correct as not certain), that this is due to the suffix -phone being Greek which makes it (more likely to be) masculine gender. The suffix -phonie is a frenchified (technical term ) version so is feminine

Television is feminine because -vision is Latin and in this form likely to be feminine

(the word television is unusual in that it combines a Greek prefix with a Latin suffix)

WTF is 'masculine' and 'feminine' used in grammar at all then? Do all 'gendered' languages - actually describe them as m/f/n - or might there be similar groupings which were denoted in some other way? Perhaps 'gendered' languages could keep their grammar but just call it by other terms (why not e.g red,green and blue groups?)

Sorry, diverging OT. Hm... well, m/f designation might still be applicable in medical contexts but presumably by 3014 that would really be too crude and we'd all have individual treatment based on our whole genome not just X/Y chromosome anyway.

I don't know errol and yes sorry it is off topic now. There are some similarities especially where languages have the same root (e.g. Latin) but you can't always guarantee.

I am pretty fluent in French and can usually make a good guess at the gender of a new noun

Where it came from I don't know, but it does say a lot about the structure of a society in terms of how people categorise people and things if you have gendered nouns I think

Everyday is a school day on MN. I love this place.

I had another thought about the OP last night:

Men and women are seen as equally capable of and responsible for all aspects of child-raising (apart from breast feeding).

Surely by 3014 it will be routine for men to be able to be medically enhanced to allow lactation? Male lactation can occur, abnormally in humans but normally in the Dayak fruit bat (I do like that it's a 'megabat' )

Good point, why did languages evolve into genders, rather than, say, this is a North word and this is a South word. Or yin and yang, light and dark, any set of opposites!

To be fair, when I've studied language recently, there has been no mention of gender, but just this is a Die word, this is a Das word, etc. But that's using apps so might be doing it on purpose. I teach English and I know there's some stuff in textbooks we still use which isn't considered PC any more or even language forms which are outdated, if you find a textbook old enough.

Germans still have a separate word for male and female versions of pretty much every job title, but it's often simplified e.g. "We're hiring a salesman (m/f)" rather than saying "We're hiring a salesman/woman" (although you see that too).

My friend here has children at a multilingual school and told me about a corker - they were asking parents to nominate local heroes for an award, and the translated text on the leaflet went something like this:

...You could nominate a doctor, a teacher, a police officer, a pastor. It could also be a woman!

...as though women are some entirely new category of people

"it could also be a woman!"

that is a corker. imagine, a local hero who was a woman

i guess it evolved into genders because so much of the way we think and the structure of our society is based on that binary

i'm ashamed to admit it, but for me numbers and letters are divided into male and female and have their own personalities. there's no real logic to it, and the personalities aren't stereotypically masculine/feminine according to the gender of the number/letter, but somehow i've taken on this way of categorising them in my head

incidentally, it does make remembering longish numbers very easy for me, because they ahve a collective personality that helps me remember the "type" of number and its pattern

although i might be a complete weirdo in this respect (i don't know, i've never checked with anyone else whether they think in the same way), that gender division is clearly very deeply embedded in my way of categorising the world around me, whether i like it or not

I used to think of numbers 1-6 as 'sweet' and 7-10 as 'savoury'. Which may be odder than male/female but at least it shows that there are other possibilities.

And has conveniently reminded me I've not had my lunch yet.

Sounds like a type of Synesthaesia, Petula. And Errol actually!

I did wonder if it was a mild form of that, but I don't experience any other such phenomena.