Recently, I saw a post on Facebook in which a male police officer was quoted as saying: “Being called a Policewoman doesn’t bother me at all, because I know it covers both women and men”. My first reaction was to wonder if I ever had heard the term “policewoman” used in such a manner. For a moment, I even considered that it was a specific police department’s policy to use the term “policewoman” on both male and female personel alike.
Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to realize what the actual point behind the meme most likely was. Though I never have heard the term “policewoman” used to cover a group including any men, I have heard the term “policeman” used so many times to refer to the women as well as to the men of law enforcement that I lost count long ago.
Of course, it always struck me as odd to use the term “policeman”, an obvious concatenation of “police” and “man”, on a group that did and should include women. It had this effect on me from the very first time this was brought to my attention in early grade-school when someone’s mother visited the class, and the teacher introduced her explaining, “so-and-so’s mother is a policeman”. However, many people are so used to the erasure of women that occurs every time you use the term “man” to refer to groups that include women, that they don’t even notice it when it goes to the extreme of referring to a specific individual who is a woman.
This is not limited to terms like “policeman”. A web-site called “Chron” has an article titled “What Does It Take to Be a Woman Fireman?”
– and in the world of software development, the amount of work done by one member of the development team in an hour is called a “man-hour”.
However, the fact that most people are so used to such use of language does not make it the right thing to do. A linguistic trait that is founded on the universal presumption of maleness is still inherently dismissive of the presence of women – and it’s acceptance simply means that such dismissiveness of women has been so pervasive in our society for such a long time that it has even made it’s way into our language.
