Today I came across this story by a man named Kim, whose quest for a job was seemingly hampered by his gender-neutral but female-sounding given name. The moment he added ‘Mr.’ to his CV, the interview invitations started to pour in. In no time, he landed an excellent job, after months of having his CV with the 'missing' ‘Mr.’ being systematically ignored. Of course, this will not surprise anyone familiar with the studies on how a CV is perceived in function of the associations created by the name at the top: in many cultures, everything other than ‘white male’ associations is bound to make the CV be evaluated less positively.
This phenomenon is related to something I’ve been thinking about a bit as of lately, namely the concept of gender-neutral given names. My two daughters have unambiguously female names, but if I were to name a child now, I would opt for a gender-neutral name, both for a boy and for a girl. The point is not to preclude the kind of discrimination documented in these CV studies against female-sounding names, as the effect of a gender-neutral name for a boy is likely to be detrimental (as in Kim’s story above). The point is rather to counter the obsession with tracking gender that seems to be pervasive in virtually every human society.
Cordelia Fine makes this point nicely in her book Delusions of Gender, observing for example that the first question that is typically asked when a baby is born is: “is it a boy or a girl?” Why does this matter above, for example, how baby and mother are doing, among other aspects of the baby’s newly acquired existence? Well, the answer is sort of obvious: historically, gender has been one of the pillars on which societal structures rest (mostly for worse rather than for better), and this is reflected linguistically in gender pronouns and other gender markers, as well as in gender-specific given names. But as we attempt to move towards social structures where gender is a less salient feature of a person, in particular but not exclusively in professional spheres, alleviating our languages’ obsession with tracking gender seems like a natural move. (There is a wikipedia entry for gender-neutral language, and one for (by and large) genderless languages such as Malay and Basque.)
For example, recently, the Swedish National Encyclopedia added the gender-neutral pronoun ‘hen’, which can be applied to people “who don't wish to specifically identify as male or female, and it is now an official third pronoun in Swedish.” For female academics, one of the joys of finally obtaining one’s PhD degree is to be able to use the gender-neutral title ‘Dr.’ in front of their names. And the good news is that, if the internet is to be believed, opting for a gender-neutral name is a growing trend in baby-naming. (If you are looking for ideas, here is a list with such names in English with frequency distribution in 2012; the ones at the top are the most ‘balanced’ ones.)
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