Research shows that ‘people’ usually means ‘men’ in most contexts, and the ramifications for women are wide and varied
Opinion: The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development released its Homeless Outlook last week – a website with the data it uses to develop its policy.
Women account for half the homeless population, and women’s experience of homelessness differs from that of men (they couch surf rather than sleep rough on the streets).
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Given that the policy and funding responses to women’s homelessness will need to be different from men’s, it was a shock to see there was no data available by gender in its Outlook.
Or maybe we should have expected this.
Its Homelessness Action Plan talks about ‘homeless people’ mostly as a homogeneous group of ‘people’ with women mentioned in a couple of paragraphs on page 25.
The use of ‘people’ is where the problem starts because research shows ‘people’ usually means ‘men’.
Researchers from New York University analysed texts from corporate annual reports to internet chat rooms and found the seemingly innocuous words ‘person’, ‘people’ or ‘individual’ usually described men.
Their analysis of more than half a trillion words on three billion web pages found that there was more overlap between the words for people and words for men, than words for people and women – meaning men are written about as if they are default humans.
Digging deeper they found that women are written about in gender-stereotyped ways (being associated with compassion and giggling for example) and men are not – men are presented generically as people.
But it’s not only words. A study of more than 16,000 images in 12 medical text books (recommended by prestigious universities) found that images of white men predominate. Men are presented as the ‘universal model’ of the human being.
The ramifications of ‘men as default for people’ are wide and varied.
Face masks are based on a model of a male head. Women’s faces are smaller and shaped differently so the masks don’t fit as well – a problem for the largely female health care workforce who have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of the pandemic.
Crash test dummies used to give cars their safety ratings are (up until last year) based on an average male body. Women, who are shorter and lighter on average, with differences in the shape of their torsos and hips and with a different centre of gravity, are three times more likely to receive whiplash in a crash than men.
So when the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development talks about homeless people, with no gender analysis, we should rightly be nervous.
But the research shows that many of us conflate men with people, people with men.
It doesn’t take much to cut and analyse data by gender. But doing so would have a substantial impact on the health and wellbeing of women health professionals, of homeless women and all women who drive cars.
