An opinion survey that generated a very strong opinion!

Most incoming emails that ask me to complete a survey move fairly speedily to the “trash” folder. But, this one seemed to be worth looking at. So I did and completed the survey called “Networking and the Sexes” in a few minutes.

But, then I felt compelled to write to the surveyors. I’d be interested to know whether you think that my stance makes sense.

I wrote to them as follows:

I’ve just completely your “Gender” survey about “Networking and the Sexes” and hope that my contribution is useful; it also caused me to think a little about my use of networks.

I’d like to raise a point about something which I find irritating, and so it is possible that others might too. This is by no means specific to your survey; it is quite common. But it seems worth pointing out to you because it is central to advertised purpose of your particular survey.

The point is about the arbitrary, incorrect and seemingly interchangeable use of the words “sex” and “gender”, as you have even done in the titles of the email and of the survey. As your survey is advertised to be about the differences in networking behaviour between men and women, it seems particularly important to get this right.

The sexes are “male”, “female” and a number of types of “hermaphrodite”; the genders are “masculine”, “feminine” and “neuter”. The distinction between sexes is applied to people, animals, plants and so on; the distinction between genders is applied primarily to words. In other words, “gender” is a grammatical term!

The most common practical experience of gender is languages which attribute gender to words. This includes languages such as German, French, Italian, Latin and many others, but does not include English. For example, in French, masculine nouns take the definite article “le” and feminine ones “la”; this has some correlation with sex when applied to living things, but this is not fundamental to grammatical gender.

So, I suggest, mention of “gender” has no place in your survey. The correct term for the distinction between men and women is “sex”. On this basis, and from my knowledge of the questions in the survey, I also suggest that your “book on gender and networking” will be nothing of the sort; it will have nothing to do with “gender” and is much more likely to be a book about networking and the sexes.

The apparent purpose of the incorrect use of the term “gender” seems to be create some kind of artificial or polite form of the term “sex”. This is linguistically similar to the incorrect use of the term “marketing” to refer to activities that are, in fact, related to “promotion” or “sales”.

Perhaps the reason that you titled the email “gender survey” and write that the book is about “gender and networking” is that you do not want to call it a “sex survey” or to write that the book is about “sex and networking”. If so, I think that I understand why, but do you? I agree that these would be poor descriptions; this is not because they are incorrect, but because they are ambiguous. Your descriptions are the incorrect ones!

Incorrect use of the “gender”, “marketing” or other apparently preferable terms has the potential for making the problem worse. It blurs the distinction between the meanings. It leaves the correct term to apply only to some narrow subset of its former meaning. Over time, the incorrectly used term is likely to take on the meaning of the apparently less preferable term, so losing the intended effect. This has the consequence that, before long, it becomes necessary to adopt yet another term which is even less accurate and, probably, more obscure as we all descend into a mess of politically correct gobbledygook.

So, if you are in the business of gathering, organising and distributing information, please use words clearly, consistently and correctly.

I wish you success with this potentially interesting survey.

So, do I have  point? Or have I “lost the plot”? Answers in a comment please!

By John Lewis

• Musings