Gender stereotyping starts early in life. Audience insights agency Bigeye interviews 4 experts on the impact of these stereotypes on consumers’ self-concept.
IN CLEAR FOCUS: Gen Z and Y consumers in the US see gender as a continuum rather than the binary of male or female. To discuss issues raised in Bigeye’s national study, Gender: Beyond The Binary, we’re joined by Michael Solomon, consumer behavior psychologist; Dr. Christia Spears Brown, child development expert; Sonia Thompson, CEO of Thompson Media Group and expert in inclusive and multicultural marketing; and Ari Dennis, who identifies as nonbinary and is embracing gender-creative parenting.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of GENDER: BEYOND THE BINARY.
Ari Dennis: There’s going to be socially a lot more space for gender to be expressed as the individual identity that it is.
Michael Solomon: Younger people see it more as a continuum, not just two buckets, male and female,
Christia Spears Brown: I think this is one of the areas where we’ve seen the most rapid cultural shift of any of the social categories we have.
Sonia Thompson: The demographic makeup of the consumer is changing drastically, becoming more diverse and as a result, brands are going to have to adjust or risk losing the people who they want to serve.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to the first episode in a series of podcasts, reflecting the results from Bigeye’s 2021 study, GENDER: BEYOND THE BINARY. My name is Adrian Tennant, VP of Insights at Bigeye, an audience-focused creative-driven, full-service advertising agency based in Orlando, Florida. To understand whether or not depictions of traditional gender roles in advertising influence brand perceptions and to quantify consumer’s opinions about gendered products, our study involved more than 2,000 adults representing a broad range of generations, socioeconomic backgrounds, geographic locations, and gender identities. In this podcast, we’re going to be talking to experts about how children develop an awareness of gender roles very early in life, why gender is central to consumers’ self-concept, and what the experiences of nonbinary parents can teach us about the evolution of gender identity and expression. To kick things off, consumer behavior psychologist Michael Solomon explained self-concept in a marketing context and why gender is so important.
Michael Solomon: Most of the things that we buy are somehow related to projects that we’re engaged in. And when I say a project, what I mean is, “What is my identity that I’m trying to improve?” You know, whether it’s being a better tennis player, a better insights manager, a better husband, what have you. And so the self is so central to all of this because in an almost unconscious way, we’re constantly trying to validate who we are, make sense of who we are, given the environment we’re in and how good a job we’re doing in that environment. And so the cues that we use to help us answer those questions often are related to the possessions or services that we buy because they help to define who we are. And so I can’t stress enough how fundamental that is to many marketing strategies.
Adrian Tennant: Given that an important part of consumers’ self-concept is the gendered self, I asked Michael when the obsession with gender starts.
Michael Solomon: As soon as you’re born, you’re typecast as a male or female, you might even get a blue diaper or a pink diaper. And it just gets worse from there, you know? So many of the products that we buy, if you think about it, are gendered and you know, you put a product in front of people in a focus group, or what have you, and you say, “What gender is this?” Some of them look at you like you’re nuts. But most of them answer the question pretty easily. So for example, household cleaning products that have letters and numbers in them, you know, like Formula 401, that kind of thing. You know, that’s based on work that shows that actually, we assume that to be more masculine and therefore more scientific and effective because it’s gendered as male, even though it’s a household cleaning product that’s probably predominantly used by women. They think of it more as male or like their Mr. Clean product, or something like that. And in every category, it’s really fascinating to see – without prompting – consumers often assume that a product has a gender. We sometimes give them the clues -you know, if we sell a Princess telephone or an American Girl doll, we’re giving them a lot of clues. But even if we don’t, consumers are usually able to assign gender as part of that self conversation.
Adrian Tennant: As Michael explained, gender stereotyping starts early. Child development expert, psychology professor, and author, Dr. Christia Spears Brown has studied the way this plays out among children and how it can impact their adult lives.
Christia Spears Brown: So really, before babies are born, we start setting up a society in which we use gender to color-categorize, to label them, and here we mean gender as a binary. So we say, “Are you having a girl or a boy?” We see it in gendered clothing, even in infancy when the parents Scotch Tape the bow to a bald baby’s head just so you’ll make sure to know that it’s a girl. So we label it really early and we seem to do that more with children than we even do with adults. So they’re really brought up from the beginning to pay attention to gender, to assume that gender is a binary, and to assume that it must be the most important characteristic about us because we talk about it so often.
Adrian Tennant: One of the first product categories that children become aware of is toys and games. For Bigeye’s gender study, we asked all respondents a series of questions about the toys they played with as children. When it comes to toys for boys, over three-quarters of cisgender male respondents agreed that when growing up their parents or guardians encouraged them to play with toys that are traditionally associated with boys – related to construction and building such as K’nnects and Lego kits or fighting and aggression such as GI Joe action figures, tanks, and toy guns. Among cisgender females, three in every five agreed that they’d been encouraged to play with toys traditionally associated with girls related to nurturing roles or their appearances such as baby dolls, Barbie dolls and accessories, ballerina costumes, makeup, and jewelry. But when we asked if their parents had encouraged them to play with any toys that interested them, regardless of their traditional associations with girls or boys, approaching two-thirds of cisgender females reported That was the case for them in contrast with just under one-half of males. I asked Christia if our results reflect what she sees in her studies in relation to evolving attitudes toward gendered play.
Christia Spears Brown: Yeah, I think they exactly track with what we see in other research. For cisgender straight men, we see this really across their lives. So when they’re boys, there are more gender restrictions on them. So they’re more likely to be teased for doing anything that’s outside of the gender stereotype. Their fathers are much more likely to punish and reward any type of what we call cross-gender play. So a boy playing with a doll, for example. So then when those boys grow up, when they become fathers, we see that cisgendered straight men are more likely to be the gender police with their children. So they are more likely to reward and punish gender-stereotypical play more so than mothers are. So, often when we think about gender stereotypes, we think about the ways that impact girls – and they do in very real ways – but for boys, the real harm of gender stereotypes is that it’s so restrictive. So girls are really allowed a little bit more flexibility than boys are, and you see the same restrictions when those boys become fathers.
Adrian Tennant: We also asked parents about what kinds of toys they encourage their own children to play with. Over three-quarters of all cisgender male parents encourage their sons to play with toys and games traditionally associated with boys – 77%, which is 17% higher than cisgender females. Significantly fewer LGBTQIA+ parents encourage their sons to play with toys associated with boys – just 50%. Over two-thirds of all cisgender males encourage their daughters to play with toys and games traditionally associated with girls at 71%. That’s 15% higher than cisgender females. Interestingly, even fewer LGBTQIA+ parents encourage their daughters to play with girl toys, at just 42%. The most likely to encourage play with whichever toys or games interest their kids are LGBTQIA+ parents at 77%. I asked Christia why this might be the case.
Christia Spears Brown: You see LGBTQIA+ parents holding fewer gender stereotypes typically, and they seem to be more flexible with their kids. So giving kids more options to explore what their interests are, you see fewer gender biases when it comes to raising, when it comes to sharing household chores, in a lot of ways in which parenting practices play out along gendered lines, LGBTQ parents are much more egalitarian and you can see that filtering down into their kids.
Adrian Tennant: For a unique perspective on what it means to reject the binary of male versus female, we spoke with Ari Dennis.
Ari Dennis: I’m non-binary and I use they/them pronouns. I’m a consultant and educator, and I work in LGBTQ+ cultural competency. In 2018, I had my child Sparrow and started advocating and educating about gender-creative parenting.
Adrian Tennant: I asked Ari how old they were when they first suspected that how they experienced gender was different from other people around them.
Ari Dennis: Well, what’s very interesting is that I was raised in an environment where my parents actually really embraced gender creativity. It was very much, you know, in the Nineties in their own way of it. But for example, I had a brother, and all growing up, he was very into Barbies and dress up and a lot of that stuff. And not only was it like he was allowed to do that, but it was very clearly laid out that we were not going to bully or tease about that. And that we were going to support if like peers ever did that. Like, there was a lot of talking about it And that was instilled in all of us from the beginning. So it actually took me a while to figure it out. I had my first awakening when I was a freshman in high school. When I said to my friends that like I literally said, “I wish gender-neutral was a thing, because if it was, I would be that.” And it was during that time, I also said, “Well, I know that I’m not a boy and I know I’m not a girl, so I guess I can’t be trans.” And this is because it was just the early 2000s. And even though I was out, you know, in the LGBT community, what was kind of mainstream was not a genderqueer or nonbinary identity. And it wasn’t until 2013 when someone heard me talking just about how I thought about gender, and they were like, “Well, have you heard about nonbinary?” And from that moment it was just a click. And I was like, “Oh, that, that is what I’ve been looking for.”
Adrian Tennant: I asked Ari to think back to when they were a child and whether they identified with the toys that are traditionally associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Ari Dennis: As a young child, I was both very gender-typical and atypical in that I kind of wanted to have it all. I loved all of the typical girl stuff – horses, dolls, dress up – but at the same time, I was very physical, climbing trees and I wanted to play, you know, the kind of war games with the boys. And video games were a huge part of my life all the way up into my teen years. So even though I was an artistic kid and so my interests sometimes trended more feminine because the arts are coded that way socially. There was a lot of stuff that was very STEM-based, you know, computers, space, that sort of thing, that also really interested me. And so all growing up, I just kind of wanted everything!
Adrian Tennant: A documentary released last year, entitled Raising Baby Gray follows two parents raising their baby in a gender-neutral manner with the intention of allowing that child to choose their gender whenever the child feels inclined to do so. Gray’s father is a trans man and the suffering he experienced being treated as a girl while growing up led to his decision to parent this way. I asked Ari, who is bringing up their child Sparrow with a gender-creative approach to parenting, what their motivation was.
Ari Dennis: Well, first I want to say that I love that documentary and I know that family. They’re part of our greater community and they’re super sweet and I love doing gender-creative parenting. And I found out how to do this because of the online community. Even before I and my family decided that we wanted to have a child, I already had an older child. So it was part of a lot of LGBT parenting groups. And it was reading in the comments, other people who had children that they had decided to not assign a gender and were using they/them. And I was like, “Gosh, you know, that is exactly what I was looking for,” but I just – I didn’t know it when I had my first kid, you know, cause I’d done everything, all the toys they wanted, all the clothes options and the pronoun thing was the one thing I kind of maybe didn’t do. So, when we were discussing having a child, it was already part of the established conversation that we were assuming we were going to do it. And it was more about what the implementation was going to look like rather than a question of if.
Adrian Tennant: So Ari made the decision to raise their child in a gender-creative manner before their child was born.
Ari Dennis: It was really nice to have time throughout the whole pregnancy to know that we were going to do it because it gave us all a lot of time to mentally and emotionally unpack a lot of our assumptions and kind of prepare for what that process was going to look like.
Adrian Tennant: I asked Ari to summarize how they define agenda creative approach to parenting as opposed to agenda neutral one.
Ari Dennis: Gender-neutral parenting is kind of a term that people are most familiar with. That means that they’re not restricting what they are allowing their kid to do as far as, you know, activities and clothes and toys. Sometimes that means that they don’t really emphasize boy things and girl things per se, but kind of focus more on things that are for both. And other times, that can mean focusing on having a lot of both boy and girl things. So it can kind of be either way. Gender-creative parenting is all of that as well as also not assigning a gender to the child and using gender-neutral pronouns as a way to further enhance the ability for the child to have as much experience without gender bias as possible during the most critically formative years of their life. So, what it is is that a child is not able to really process or conceive of gender concepts in the first two years. Gender acquisition is more of a process that starts from 18 months, until nine years old. And yet we’re programming all of these rituals and assumptions and these scripts onto children very early and gender-creative parenting is basically saying that we’re trying to remove all of that and let the child have time to just explore and eventually, hopefully, self identify.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after these messages.
[AD BREAK]
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. We’re discussing the results of Bigeye’s national study GENDER: BEYOND THE BINARY. Before the break, Ari Dennis was explaining how they prepared for the birth of their child, Sparrow, and is now raising them with gender-creative parenting. I asked Ari at what age they expect Sparrow to define their gender for themselves.
Ari Dennis: The key thing with gender-creative parenting is really to not expect anything and to realize that the ball is just totally in the child’s court. There are many children within our community that started with using they/them pronouns and have since aged out, I suppose. I think the best way to describe it would be that they were able to articulate what pronouns they wanted and were able to find the language that best describes their identity. That’s happened everywhere, from age four to they’re still 11 and 12 and don’t care and haven’t decided, you know. So it’s a whole range, but definitely by about four to eight, even though they were raised using they/them pronouns, those children are able to have the skills and understanding necessary to articulate what it is they want. And sometimes it’s to remain with they/them. And other times it is a binary identity, you know, using he or she.
Adrian Tennant: I asked Ari what the most common misconceptions about gender-creative parenting are.
Ari Dennis: People are confused and believe we are trying to force our children to have a particular identity. Usually, they’re implying or outwardly saying that we want our children to be transgender. First off, that’s not a bad thing to have your child be transgender. And secondly, it’s the exact opposite of what we’re doing, which is making an environment completely devoid of pressure. It’s very frustrating to be so misunderstood because I think with those people, we agree on the fundamental, which is that children at a young age don’t fully understand gender. And it’s just what we want to do with that information is so drastically different. I, in my community, want to give an environment of space and freedom. And other people that are critical of our way of doing it, they believe that in the time that children cannot conceptualize gender for themselves, that is when the rigidity is most important.
Adrian Tennant: In Bigeye’s study, respondents viewed a video about Mattel’s gender-free doll line, Creatable World. Each set includes a figure that looks like a prepubescent child and includes clothes traditionally associated with girls as well as boys’ clothing styles.
Creatable World Ad: Introducing Creatable World – create characters that are awesomely you. Add long or short hair, pants, hats, shirts, and skirts. It’s up to you. Mix and match for hundreds of looks. It’s so much fun. What will you create? Creatable World dolls, each sold separately.
Adrian Tennant: After watching the video, 60 percent of the parents in our study with kids aged under 18 said they would consider giving one to their child if it had been available to them. I asked Dr. Christia Spears Brown if she thought the toy industry is making progress on gender-free play options.
Christia Spears Brown: I think definitely they are. I think there are more options available within the past two or three years than there were before. But I also think at the same time and perhaps related to it, you’re also seeing the toy industry leaning into even more gendered, stereotypical toys kind of simultaneously. So you also see much more highly aggressive toys marketed to boys, highly sexualized toys marketed to girls. So I think what we’re seeing in toys is very similar to our divided culture politically, even as right now, you see this real division of a lot more gender-free options, more options that really celebrate gender diversity. And then you see some that are much more leaning into what I would argue are some of the worst gender stereotypes that we have about aggression and sexualization. So parents really are making choices as to which types of materials they want to provide to their kids.
Adrian Tennant: I asked Ari if they would have enjoyed a Creatable World figure if it had been available when they were a child.
Ari Dennis: I would have immensely loved a Creatable World doll when I was growing up. And I know that my brother who loved dolls along with me would have as well. We would have really enjoyed the ability to represent the dress-up that looked like what we did at home, you know? Cause it wasn’t uncommon for my brother to throw on a wig. And this doll, you know, has the long hair and the short hair and has the shorts and the skirt. I was the same way, I always dress up kind of pulling from both sides of the wardrobe, and to have a doll that would do the same would be really fun, I think. And I know that Hazel, my oldest child, they received a Creatable World doll when it came out, and immediately it was a big hit with all of our other dolls and really enhanced the stories and the style of play that Hazel was able to do.
Adrian Tennant: Mattel’s rival Hasbro caused some controversy a few weeks ago when its rollout of a renamed Mr. Potato Head product that no longer includes the “Mr.” The news of the gender-neutral toy initially won praise from organizations like GLAAD – the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation – but derision from some conservative politicians who viewed it as an example of “cancel culture.” After the initial announcement, Hasbro appeared to backtrack, noting that Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head would remain, but be joined by a create your potato head family, gender-neutral kit. Sonia Thompson is CEO of Thompson Media Group, an expert in inclusive and multicultural marketing, who is also the mother of a young child. I asked Sonia for her take on the Hasbro story
Sonia Thompson: Whenever Hasbro announced a change in the brand name to simply Potato Head, I think people felt like they were eliminating the traditional Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head. Those products are still available. A lot of people felt like Hasbro choosing to be inclusive of families that don’t look like the traditional family that they were canceling the traditional family. Hasbro, in fact, wasn’t doing that. They’re just giving people options to define what family looks like for them. In this one box set. Right? So again, Mr. Potato Head is still available, Mrs. Potato head is still available, but the idea is to let people choose what their own family structure ideal looks like. And data actually shows that less than half of kids in the US live in a traditional family home, where there is a mom and a dad who are in a relationship. Instead of making people potentially feel like they don’t belong or like something might be wrong with them if their family looks different from what is depicted in the box, they’re just giving people the power to be able to create what their own family looks like. But I think sometimes people get a little nostalgic to the way things are. A lot of times people don’t like change and yes, Hasbro could have done a better job of explaining it, but I think that’s where the backlash came from.
Adrian Tennant: I also asked Ari Dennis, if Hasbro’s apparent backtracking could ultimately harm its relationship with today’s parents.
Ari Dennis: I think that it’s always kind of a problem when a company attempts to extend a brand to become more inclusive and then they respond by backtracking and kind of pulling back those statements in response to the vocal minority. I don’t think it ever really reflects well on the company and I think it can make the original statements seem either confusing or even insincere. With the Hasbro situation as with a lot of times with public outcry, a lot of it was people misunderstanding the original announcement and the original plans for the brand. And I think that a lot of the assumptions and emotional reactions that people had to it were based on just knee-jerk reaction that people have to the idea of gender being removed from society.
Adrian Tennant: Another iconic American toy line is Barbie, manufactured by Mattel, which in 2019 was refreshed to include dolls with darker skin tones, textured hair, and a curvier body size, in addition to two dolls with disabilities – a wheelchair user and Barbie with a removable, prosthetic leg. In 2021, we can’t talk about gender and marginalized groups without considering intersectionality. Brands have traditionally stayed out of politics for fear of alienating sections of their customer base. But rather than shying away from the social justice issues, Mattel has leaned in. Sonia Thompson explains how the Barbie brand is addressing systemic racism.
Sonia Thompson: Barbie has been doing a lot of videos. If you go to their social media, their YouTube, they have a lot of videos, showcasing Barbie and her friends in different situations. And one of those videos they showcase Barbie and a Black doll talking about and explaining in a very Barbie-like, on-brand way, systemic racism. And how the way Barbie’s friend – who was Black – was treated, was different from the way that Barbie was treated. And they brought it up in just a very conversational way. And they had a very real discussion about a heavy topic that was digestible for young kids to be able to understand and learn that unfortunately, in our society, everyone isn’t treated equally and it is impacted sometimes by their skin color. This is something that came out maybe a few months later after the murder of George Floyd last summer. And Barbie is just recognizing that consumers don’t always compartmentalize what’s happening in the world from their experiences with your brand or whenever they’re using your brand. And they also recognize that they have a platform. And so going back to their mission, they recognize that there’s an opportunity to use their platform, to make a positive impact by raising awareness about an issue that impacts the different types of people who use their products.
Adrian Tennant: Our study showed that a significant percentage of millennial parents are supportive of gender-free early education, less stereotypical depictions of gender roles in children’s books, and are more likely than previous generations to encourage their kids to play with toys regardless of their traditional gender associations. Christia Spears Brown, in addition to being an expert on child development, is the mother of two daughters. I asked Christia what she did to avoid gender stereotypes as she raised her own children.
Christia Spears Brown: They’re still works in progress. So they’re 16 and 10 right now. But what I can say is that I definitely did practice what I preached about gender stereotypes. I pointed out gender stereotypes when I saw them so that the kids would become better at detecting them themselves. I also talked a lot about how they could talk to their friends about having diverse preferences. So when one kid was getting made fun of for only liking superheroes, we role-played ways to talk to the kids that were saying negative comments to her, so that she would feel more confident in going against those stereotypes. You know, didn’t allow things like gender segregation of birthday parties. We said you either invite everyone or no one, right? We don’t do gendered-only parties of any kind. And really just talked about gender as this diverse kind of social construct and not a necessary function of what your private parts are. That it’s much more about how we express ourselves to the world.
Adrian Tennant: I asked Christia about the gender-creative approach to parenting that Ari Dennis is taking with their child.
Christia Spears Brown: The kids who identify as something other than cisgender and allowed to express their gender seem to be doing really well and I see a couple of benefits. So one is it normalizes whatever gender the child is choosing. So it helps the child feel that they can pick whichever gender they want. And so we know that normalizing a range of expressions is always good. So there’s never going to be a concern about whether that gender identity is supported or not. We know it also reduces the use of gender as a way to categorize. And we know that that causes stereotypes. So it’s already going to be limiting the gender stereotypes kids are paying attention to. Previously the concerns were really about peer teasing and rejection. Cause we know that kids in kindergarten are really big stereotype endorsers for the most part. But I think as this becomes more common, frankly, and as representation of people across the gender spectrum becomes more common, our attitudes are really shifting and I think kids’ attitudes are shifting.
Adrian Tennant: In his book, The New Chameleons: How To Connect With Consumers Who Defy Categorization, Michael Solomon writes about significant changes in opinions about gender – especially among younger consumers – going so far as to describe Gen Z as “post-gender.” I asked him to explain why.
Michael Solomon: Younger people today are not seeing the boundaries that you and I might see, having grown up in an earlier time. You know, when you look at younger people, a majority of them agree that gender is not as important in defining a person as it used to be. So it’s not to say that gender has gone away, but when I say that it’s post-gender, what I mean is it’s post-binary. It bodes well for issues of gender justice, racial justice, and so on. There seems to be a sea change for many of them in terms of, how relevant this is – whereas, for us, it’s the first thing we might jump to.
Adrian Tennant: In our report, just over one-half of all respondents agreed that in a decade, we’ll associate gender with stereotypical personality traits, products, and occupations, much less than we do today. I asked Ari Dennis what kind of world they imagined their child will inhabit as they enter adulthood.
Ari Dennis: I look at where things were when I was in my teens at the beginning of the Millennium and where we are now, just 20 years later. And it really does feel sometimes in a little bit like a sci-fi story, in a positive way. Misogyny is getting questioned. Rape culture is getting deconstructed. There’s so much work that’s happening, but I think that’s going to keep gaining momentum and exponentially growing over the next few decades to the point where just seeing how many families every year are doing gender-creative parenting and how much more it is from the year before. By the time Sparrow’s in middle school, it won’t be weird that they were raised this way. You know, it’ll be quirky. They’ll definitely be on the fringe, but it’s not going to be unheard of. It’s just going to be, “Oh, you had one of those families.” And I think in general, there’s going to be socially a lot more space for gender to be expressed as the individual identity that it is.
Michael Solomon: Younger people see it more as a continuum, not just two buckets, male and female, and they really get a kick out of experimenting and moving across that continuum back and forth.
Christia Spears Brown: Kids growing up now are really in a different climate than kids were 10 years ago. I think this is one of the areas where we’ve seen the most rapid cultural shift of any of the social categories we have.
Sonia Thompson: If you even just look at the data. The demographic makeup of the consumer is changing drastically. And it’s becoming more diverse and as a result, brands are going to have to adjust or risk losing the people who they want to serve.
Ari Dennis: And you know, maybe in two or three decades, gender identity will be treated like music preference – that we all have one, and it’s very important to us. And no one can tell us what it is for us. And we can’t even maybe describe why the music we like is what we like, but no one should like, not be allowed to vote because they don’t like polka.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve been listening to GENDER: BEYOND THE BINARY. If you’d like to read the full report on which this podcast is based, please go to Bigeye.agency/gender. In addition to requesting the report, you can watch an on-demand webinar that highlights some of the key findings. To learn more about the guests featured in this episode – Michael Solomon, Dr. Christia Spears Brown, Ari Dennis, and Sonia Thompson – here’s where you can find them.
Michael Solomon: Go to my website, which is MichaelSolomon.com. Or drop me an email. That’s very easy, Michael, at Michael solomon.com
Christia Spears Brown: Twitter’s where I’m most active. So @ChristiaBrown is probably the easiest place to find me. And then just my regular website of ChristiaBrown.com.
Ari Dennis: So I educate on social media on Facebook, Ari Not Sorry. And @AriNotSorryEd on Instagram and Twitter as well. And you can always find me at aridennis.com.
Sonia Thompson: You can find everything at the hub: at SoniaEThompson.com and you will find everything from there.
Adrian Tennant: You’ll also find links in the transcript for this podcast. Just go to Bigeyeagency.com/insights and select the button marked “podcast.” Coming up next time on GENDER: BEYOND THE BINARY:
Ari Dennis: Binary, gendered language is everywhere in how we speak and we don’t really realize it.
Christia Spears Brown: We say, “Oh, what a pretty girl”, “What a strong boy you are.”
Sonia Thompson: Google Translate will automatically make certain professions male versus female, and the assumptions that are built into the algorithms.
Tisse Mallon: Somebody asking me, for example, “Yeah, but what’s your real name?” As if a name that I have claimed for myself is not real.
Adrian Tennant: A look at gendered language, names, and pronouns – that’s next time on GENDER: BEYOND THE BINARY. Thanks for listening. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next time, goodbye.
