Every now and again, I get a work email addressed to “Gentlemen”. I’m generally cc’d, so technically the addressing is correct. But the other day, I was in the “to” list, so I decided I was justified in calling the author on it.
His justification – it had originally been to three (all male) people, and at the last minute he added me, as he realised I needed to get the email also.
Underneath the superficially reasonable explanation though, any email addressed to “Gentlemen”(whether I’m in the to or the cc list) says to me that the author’s default (and probably entirely unconscious) assumption is that his (invariably his) work colleagues are male. And when there is (occasionally) a woman in his list, he has to change from his normal approach. Most of the people who send those emails are superficially entirely unsexist in person. But I’m still, deep in their subconscious, the slightly odd interloper that has changed their workplace from the way it used to be.
I am going to show this post to the mister…I was shocked one day when I was looking over his shoulder to see that he was receiving emails which started Gentlemen…
I was truly gobsmacked, and I asked him about it and he said much the same thing, that there weren’t any women in the list. In the quietest voice I could muster, I explained that there never would be if that is their default position, and also starting an email, ‘Gentlemen and such and such’ is equally unacceptable. And as far as I know, he has stopped doing it, but it made me feel quite despondent for a while – I mean if a thoughtful, intelligent man like him is doing that, what hope do we have?
And anyway, what is wrong with using people’s names?
Sending an email addressed to “Gentlemen” when some of the addressees are female is pretty rude. But I’m having a hard time understanding ThirdCat’s upset at someone using it when it’s actually appropriate. Is this on a mailing list, rather than a specific collection of people?
Using names gets awkward once there are a few people on the to-line (and especially on mailing lists), so I usually use “All” instead. Anyone have a polite gender-neutral term that’s better (nicer, warmer) than “All”?
Andrew: read carefully the OP and ThirdCat’s offence, and you might grasp more easily where the problem lies. It seems to me that the problem isn’t whether or not it’s appropriate in that instance, but rather that is the assumed and default setting for these people; if some other term were the standard, then nobody would take the time to think whether “gentlemen” happened to be appropriate this time because there would be no point in doing so.
As for a gender-neutral term that’s nicer than “all”: depending on the intended audience, the following would serve quite well:
“Colleagues” (for a business email, such as the one in the OP)
“Friends” (obvious really)
“Folks” (general, although I understand that in some variants of English, “folks” refers to family relatives – a possibility, going from the formation of “gentlemen”, would be “Gentlefolk”)
“Team” (if you’re organising something and the addressees are all a part of the plan – alternatives could be, depending on the formality level, “conspirators”, “fellow-plotters”, “gang”)
Although “Guys” has taken on a gender-neutral usage nowadays, I hesitate to suggest it, because it has taken on that usage through precisely the sort of lazy and sexist assumption that is criticised in the OP – that is, in groups that would once have been all-male there are now female members, but those groups still got addressed as “guys”; the usage has reached the point where now women will address all-women groups as “guys” sometimes.
Just as an experiment, you could try addressing recipients of emails to multiple people as “ladies” and see what happens. Or for a laugh, you could use “darlings”!
Thanks Snowdrop Explodes, for explaining it much better than I managed the first time. It’s really all about the default assumption. If you have to think every time about whether there is a “non gentleman” in your email, then your default assumption is that it is generally men. At the senior levels, my company is about 20% female, so it is often quite a reasonable assumption that there will be no women in the group, but surely it must be an effort to think about it all the time!
Interesting. I now realize that I regard “who the email is to” as one of the most important things about it – if that changes, the entire email may change. So I actually don’t think it’s much of an effort to get the salutation right.
I am therefore one of those people that trims irrelevant addressees from emails. .
My inbox is daily witness to the fact that others do not think this way, though, and the OP clearly has colleagues that don’t think this way either.
But if Penguin’s company is about 20% female, and the average group email is to 3 people, then there’s a roughly 50% chance one of them is female. So I hope the original perpetrator doesn’t work anywhere connected with risk management.
You’ve missed the point again: a gender-neutral salutation would be “right” regardless of whether it’s all men or all women or a mixture of both who are the recipients. If it were normal practice to assume that there’s at least one of each in the readership then there would be no question of “getting the salutation right” because it would always be right (or at least, as with my previous comment, the consideration would be appropriateness to the roles, gender wouldn’t come into it).
The concern in the OP and in ThirdCat’s comment, is that the normal assumption is still that it would only be men receiving the email, even though “officially” there’s no longer a “glass ceiling”. This is a form of sexism, and it’s one that the perpetrators of it probably don’t realise they’re doing.
My counterpoint is that there is no such thing as a default email, and therefore no default salutation (as you note, role-based salutations must also change with the to-list). The original emailer might have seen that he had an all-male to-list, and deliberately chosen “Gentlemen” for effect (and then rudely left it there when he added Penguin). Given his mistake, I suspect he didn’t, but someone more careful might well do this.
“Gentlemen” is a word with many overtones, and only some are gender-specific – compare to “Men” or “Guys” to see what I mean (ignoring for the moment the modern effort to turn “Guys” into a gender-neutral word). It isn’t necessarily a gender code-word, although I’m aware that it will be for some.
It is a problem for English that history has left us with a muddle of salutations and pronouns that do not cover all situations well enough, hence modern use of “Y’All”, “Youse” and “Guys”. “Gentlemen” has overtones that I think are shared with “Ladies and Gentlemen” – but both are plural. And “Ladies” may be different again. We also have no gender-neutral third-person singular (the closest we have is to overuse “they” instead of “he” or “she”).
Perhaps a more salient problem is the history effect: if I address my team of Alex, Bob and Charlie as “Gentlemen”, and correctly start using “Team” when Daniella turns up, then I am loudly saying to Alex, Bob and Charlie “There’s a female in here!”, even if Daniella notices nothing (but her too if she has access to archives). I did wonder if that was ThirdCat’s point.
I guess my question is, if it’s shocking to use “Gentlemen” even when it’s appropriate to the audience, is the word to be tossed in the bin (at least in a professional context)?
Just to provide context for my comments: I searched for the word “Gentlemen” in my email archive, 1.7Gb covering about 7 years (I guess about 20K messages). I found it used 15 times. One was “Good Morning to the fine Ladies and Gentlemen of this forum” on a mailing list, one was “Any comment from you other gentlemen?” in the body of the message. The rest were salutations of “Gentlemen,…”
None was used where women were on the to or cc lists (except the mailing list one, which is a huge audience). Several were from people I got a lot of email from, frequently to an all-male audience, but who only used “Gentlemen” once (or in one case twice). Five were *from* women, including the other person who used it twice. Interestingly, 5 out of 15 is a lot higher than the overall numbers of women where I work – I am a software engineer.
So that’s how I’ve seen the word used. Your mileage may vary.
SnowdropExplodes has explained it much better than I did.
It’s not about the chances of there being a woman around, or whether or not Daniella turns up, or whether she notices or whether it is used when there actually was a woman in the group…it’s about the implicit assumption that there’s no Daniella there in the first place. And it’s about the fact that we even have to point this out to people.
The simplest thing to do is use people’s names. That’s what I do.
In a word – yes! In a professional context, the gender should (in general) not be a matter of issue, so there should be no purpose served by using a word with gendered connotations at all. Why would you even need to know, for professional communications, whether Alex is short for Alexander or Alexandra; Bob is short for Robert or Roberta; Charlie is short for Charles or Charlene? (Thanks for using names that could be gendered either way, BTW – it makes this point so much easier to explain!) But by assuming (as you did) that Alex, Bob and Charlie are all male, you are announcing to them all that male is normal, and female is a special case. This is something that feminist theorists describe as “male privilege”, and “othering”, and is a key element in supporting and perpetuating sexism.
There’s a world of difference between hailing people as “team” in a professional context and “friends” in another, versus whether you use a gendered term or not.
Incidentally, your implied remark “but GIRLS do it TOO!” doesn’t make it okay: sexism pervades society, and unfortunately that means sexist assumptions are made by women as well as men; it should be called out and corrected whoever does it.
Just in the interests of accuracy, in my example I know Alex, Bob, Charlie and Daniella personally, and I have no need to assume anything. In real life I did assume that those names would make sense in context as male and female names respectively; I didn’t attempt to make them gender-ambiguous (or unambiguous).
In my experience there are no gender-unambiguous names, just exceptions you haven’t encountered yet. If I’d been going that way, I would have used names like Lynn, Jody, Quentin and Cameron.
“…in my example I know Alex, Bob, Charlie and Daniella personally, and I have no need to assume anything.”
Which doesn’t affect the central point that I am trying to make here.
You are still announcing that “male” is “normal” and “female” is the “special case” that needs an exception to be made for its presence. This, while not meant as sexist, serves to perpetuate sexism in society and the workplace.
Q.E.D.
I guess as a point of interest Andrew could try and recall the number of times he has received a group email addressed to “Ladies”.
“Recall”? That’s what email archives are for.
My archive contains three emails addressed to “Ladies”. One is the “Ladies and Gentlemen” mentioned earlier (written by a man). One was sent to other people and subsequently forwarded to me; the other was addressed to other people and cc’d to me. These two were both written by (different) women.
For consistency of comparison, I should say that of those addressed to “Gentlemen”, 7 were direct to me, 2 were cc’d to me, and 5 were subsequently forwarded.
And before SnowdropExplodes asks… I did hope, but I have no archived email addressed to “Darlings”.
Here via the DUFC. I really like this post. I don’t get “gentleman”, but I have had similar thoughts about “guys” which is frequently used for both men and women colloquially. Although, then to confound the issue I go and use “dudes” for both men and women just because I like the way it sounds.
Andrew, I’m not sure if this conversation has been resolved, but I’d just say that if you see yourself writing an email differently depending on whether you’re talking to a man or a woman, there’s something a bit wrong there. It shouldn’t be an effort, it’s the automatic reflex to male-gendered terms that is the problem.
Andrew: if we were living in a perfectly equal world using “gentlemen” on the odd occasion when you were emailing a bunch of people that all happened to be male wouldn’t be problematic.
A hypothetical and really bad example to compare to: What if I decided that all my business emails should mention what people have in common when I greet them? I could say “hello whites” or “ya upper middle classers” or “engineers” (ok, I might start using that one!) or “correspontants of the mighty Katherine” (ok now I’ve got sidetracked). You might notice that some of these are problematic.
And I disagree with your statement that there is no “default” email group. I have several distinct groups that I email all the time, and I would assume that a lot of people would have this. When I joined my team at work, my boss probably had to stop using “gentlemen” as a greeting when emailing the team (I know him, he probably did. To his credit, he doesn’t now send emails to the team starting with “gentlemen and lady”). And yeah, sometimes I feel like an intruder and like I’m not supposed to be here, thanks to that sort of thing. Could do with less being exposed to the “oh crap there is a woman here now” thoughts from the gentlemen’s lizard brains.
Sure, I can keep digging.
Humans mostly learn language by listening to others use it and forming hypotheses about what they mean. This is how words like “decimated” can change meaning. So what you take from a word is a kind of summary of everyone who’s used it in your hearing. What I understand from “Gentlemen” is a formal call for focused attention – think “Gentlemen, start your engines!” or “To business, gentlemen.” When I get email that starts with “Gentlemen” – and I’ve been looking at my collection in one go, so this isn’t just an impression – it almost always means there’s an issue that the sender wants sorted out quickly or carefully.
Penguin clearly has a different experience. She hears it from males only (“invariably his”) who use it as a default salutation which is changed with reluctance. I hear it from both genders, and despite a large fraction of my email being addressed to males only, I hear it very infrequently – literally one message in a thousand. Even those who do use it, use other salutations in most cases. This suggests a deliberate decision when it is used (not any kind of default). I don’t know why that difference appears (it could be the different types of industries we work in), and I don’t know which of us is closer to the typical experience. The reaction I’m seeing here suggests my experience is unusual.
I don’t know of a really good gender-neutral substitute. “All” (my usual choice) is just bland. “Team” is not really formal nor especially focused, and doesn’t work outside a small group; “Colleagues” is better but still not as formal, and won’t work across organizations or vertically in a hierarchy. Names are often informal unless specially treated (and get very unwieldy as addressees are added). “Ladies and Gentlemen” has plurality problems, although most people would probably ignore them. The “High Importance” flag, for those whose email clients support it, works well across organizations but is rather brusque.
I see “Gentlemen” as a word that is useful despite, not because of, its gender associations (although even without those it actually started out meaning “upper-class people”… but it’s since been co-opted as a term of formal politeness, among other things). But that usefulness has to be balanced against the other impressions it may leave, and you can’t just use words without considering how other people use them and how they will be understood. “If we were living in a perfectly equal world…” is the sort of thing I was expecting to hear in this case. I see a big difference between that and the shock and despair that ThirdCat showed, which is why I originally asked what I was missing.
I still suspect that many and possibly most of the people who use “Gentlemen” are doing so for the formality and not the gender implications (certainly this matches what I see in my email archive). Threads like this one may cause them to go looking for a new term, and start using it, which is the quickest way to fix the problem. What causes words to acquire formality? Is there a linguist in the house?
I am a paralegal and my boss is 91 years old. Every time he dictates a letter to me addressing a position or company where the recipient is unknown, he has me put “Gentlemen” if it is a position historically held by a male and “Ladies” if it is historically held by a women. For example, I am currently writing to the “Government of External Affairs of India”. He is having me address it as “Dear Gentlemen”. If, however, I were writing to a lowly secretary or clerk, he would have me address it as “Dear Ladies”. I know he is an old fart and doesn’t get just how offensive he is being, but it still drives me up the wall. One time I tried to correct it by using “Dear Sir or Madam” and he actually called me on it and had me change it to “Dear Gentlemen”. I almost quit right there on the spot, but unfortunately I need this job too bad-to top it off, I recently asked for a raise and was denied. I guarantee I make less than any other paralegal in the area–probably because he doesn’t feel that someone with a vagina is ‘worthy’ of making a living wage. However, I do a spectacular job for his old, shriveled, incompetent, behind the times dick. I have a huge amount of resentment towards him, can you tell?