Google’s sexist spell checker
When you search “she invented” on Google, it asks you, “Did you mean ‘he invented?’”
Laura and I searched some other phrases like, “she imagined,” “she created,” “she created the world,” “she guides,” and “she leads” and got “Did you mean ‘he did this?’” for all of them. Wow.
This spell checker works by checking the most common spelling of a word, and if there are more results for another word it will suggest you change the spelling to make your results more “relevant.” Wow. I doubt that Google is intentionally being sexist, but they could stop that from happening, and they should, because these results perpetuate, through language, like Jessica Valenti said, the kind of sexist ideology that becomes “normal” in our culture.
And we couldn’t find ANY that did the opposite: even if we typed in “he nurtures” or “he gives birth” — or any number of other tries — we couldn’t come up with any that gave the suggestion “DID YOU MEAN: she nurtures?” I think that’s because men are talked/written about so much more than women (still) that there’s really no verb that hasn’t been connected to men in more quantity than to women.
Oh, and if we put in something like “she follows,” the spell-checker was fine with that and suggested no alternatives. The ONLY alternatives it gave were when we put a strong verb (something to do with action or economic power or leadership) with the pronoun “she.” THEN it was very forthcoming with “DID YOU MEAN: he…?”
Yikes. It’s a reflection of the words we all swim in every day unconsciously. I agree: google should code into their spell checker NOT to make any spell suggestions about pronouns.
Laura D. May
May 10, 2007 at 9:53 am
[...] as Chanel put it, Laura and I searched some other phrases like, “she imagined,” “she created,” “she [...]
sexist google spellchecker « Cultivated Pages
July 18, 2007 at 11:27 pm