Why address your letter to a Sir? We have a female editor now
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Version 0 of 1. A small, though not unimportant, bugbear is the number of letters the Guardian receives that begin addressed to “Sir”, or “Sirs”. The letters desk receives a significant number of these per day, perhaps because, while we omit the addressee when publishing a letter, other newspapers, including the Telegraph and the Times, continue to use this more formal style. It is, to my mind, an archaic convention, and one that the Guardian dispensed with long ago in 1988 as part of the Hillman redesign. But more important, addressing your letter to “Sir” or “Sirs” no longer makes any sense. The Guardian has had a female editor-in-chief for almost a year now – Katharine Viner took over in June 2015. Many readers have cottoned on to this and address their letters either “Dear Madam”, “Madam”, or simply: “To the Editor”, but a surprising number either remain oblivious or continue the “Sir” tradition regardless. You might think that the continued use of “Sir/Sirs” is because letter writers have sent their musings to a number of different newspapers, some of which still use the convention. But this is rarely the case; the vast majority of letters we receive directly pertain to articles that have appeared only in the Guardian. While some readers may not be aware that the newspaper’s editorship has undergone a change in gender, we have in the newsroom very much noticed. The appointment of the first female editor in the Guardian’s almost 200-year history was a significant moment and of particular inspiration to younger female journalists (you can’t be what you can’t see, as feminists are fond of saying). Like many fields of work, journalism has been slow to modernise, and seeing letters continually addressed to “Sir” or “Sirs” – often in the assumption that a man must be in charge – is a reminder of that. While far from being an especially distressing example of the sexism women experience globally on a day-to-day basis – a disclaimer many of us feel bound to make whenever we highlight cases of gender bias – the language we use does matter. The default authority figure in so many people’s minds continues to be a man, whether we ourselves are male or female. A favourite Biff cartoon of mine – the co-creators of which, Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd, are Guardian alumni – makes light of such gender biases. It shows an elegantly dressed woman in a pillbox hat sitting across a desk from an older man in a suit. “Tell me Doctor … How can I be slim?” it reads. “You see, I only eat normal meals, but look at me!” “Don’t worry”, comes the reply, “most men put on weight around your age.” Then, of course, there’s the following thought experiment: “A father and son are in a terrible car crash that kills the father. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, ‘I can’t operate – that boy is my son!’ ” When researchers put this question to college students, even self-described feminists and younger people tended to overlook the answer: that the surgeon is the boy’s mother. Children whose own mothers were doctors also experienced difficulty with the riddle, demonstrating how gender biases (or schema) are often immune to our own personal values or life experience. Hence also why the female hospital doctor I was speaking with the other day assumed my GP was a man. But just because gender schema (such as the idea that a man, and not a woman, will be in charge of a newspaper) are deeply ingrained, doesn’t mean they can’t be challenged. And a way to do that would be to politely ask readers to dispense with the “Sir/Sirs” convention when writing to the Guardian. The majority of our letter writers are male. I could argue facetiously that this is because women are too busy juggling their careers with more than their fair share of unpaid domestic labour, and that the pay gap means our salaries do not stretch to decent stationery. But actually it is, I think, because women still underestimate the importance of their own opinions, while men tend to overestimate theirs. So, as well as requesting that correspondents of both genders double-check their gender biases before addressing their letters to us, I would also implore more women to write to us. We care what you think. |