Men Under Fire

It was said casually, with a smile and a patronizing back-rub over a water cooler conversation. "Nice story today. You seem to be good at such distinctly feminine stories," I was told. The colleague was referring to a Navratri special Sunday magazine cover feature which looked at society's extension of gender stereotypes to even the Goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati. And just like that I was reminded how being in journalism does not necessarily mean a complete unshackling from the gender binary or freedom from slavery to its stereotypes.

To be fair, I am drawn to certain kinds of stories. Maybe it is my social work education, maybe it a compulsion driven by experiences and exposure. The space where culture, sociology, anthropology meet has always drawn me. Just like concerns over caste, development and gender and their inter-sectionalities drive my politics.

In the two decades I've been a journalist, this isn't the first time a label was thrown at my work. "Rural", "Abstract", "Arty", "Heavy", "Depressing", and even "Leftist (whatever that means)", are the ones I'm used to. But the use of the gender binary was a first. Coming from someone whose work station was stacked with the works of Karl Marx, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekov, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, this was a surprise.

Later I stopped him for a conversation to elaborate. "You know what you are doing is not even a proper beat like say Politics, Crime or Infrastructure. Hats off to how you pull this off for a living," he told me without mincing words. "Actually all this soft stuff belongs in colour supplements or maybe a women's lifestyle magazine."

All the editors and colleagues who trained my writing emphasised on an as-organic-as-possible connect with the reader. Keep it relevant, interesting and conversational, I have been repeatedly told. But this was new.

Sociologist Meghana Kashyap told me to brush it off. "Journalists don't come from outer space, but the same patriarchal society with all its pronounced masculine constructs. Unless a child, especially boys, are consciously raised either ideally in the absence of any gender binaries or at least made conscious of it time and again, they are socialised into believing it to be a norm."

She pointed out how this still plays out in allocation of beats (Crime, Business and Politics for the men; Education, Health and Lifestyle for women), to who will go out of office and who will handle production of pages or on-air material in the newsroom. "Sometimes this will go to the extent of women being told what to wear when out reporting. It's something men are often left out of."

I began consciously looking for gender associations with writing and discovered the early 2003 creation of an algorithm by Moshe Koppel of the Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Shlomo Argamon of the Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. "A software called 'Gender Genie' allows one to paste in a sample text of 500+ words, specifying whether it is fiction, non-fiction, or a blog entry to be told how the writing scores on a feminine to masculine spectrum. Since it uses the algorithm, it was hailed as a hard science based on counting how often certain words appear in a sample of text.

Gender Genie looks at grammar, structural and differences. "Using more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself) is seen as feminine, while words identifying or determining nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more) are seen as masculine. Some of the other feminine keywords include: Words like 'with', 'if', 'not', 'where', 'be' and 'should' are seen as feminine and 'around', 'what', 'are', 'as', 'it', 'said' are seen as masculine. Pointing out how language tends to encode gender in very subtle ways, Koppel and Argamon have claimed the algorithm predicts gender of the author correctly 80% of the time.

I offered the first 300 words of this piece for analysis and the verdict was 'Weak Male.'

Am I going to let that dictate how I choose both subjects and treatment hereafter? You bet not!