Heteronormativity and binary gender assumptions

Question

Recently quite a number of questions have been posted that contain heteronormative assumptions or assumptions about binary genders, e.g. questions about married couples that assume that these consist of female wives and male husbands, or questions about gender distributions in families that assume that all children are either male boys or female girls.

Recently a new code of conduct was adopted, and while I was strongly critical of other aspects of the code, I just as strongly supported its focus on banning all forms of discrimination. To my mind, using language that assumes the non-existence (or non-marriedness) of people who are not heterosexual and/or don't identify with a binary gender is a form of discrimination (though certainly often not a conscious or deliberate one).

The code of conduct states in relevant part:

We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. When in doubt, just don’t.

It would seem likely to offend or alienate people to talk as if they didn't exist. I would therefore hope that we can agree that posting such questions without a critical reflection of this aspect violates the code of conduct (again, often not consciously or deliberately). I'm well aware that existing books are full of such examples, and I wouldn't want to go so far as to say that these cannot be used or referred to here in any way (after all, people may have gotten them as homework against their will); but I do think that they shouldn't be used without mentioning this offensive aspect and clarifying that the author of the post doesn't endorse it.

What do others think about this?

(I'm aware that this is also a more general issue beyond the math site, but it also has a math-specific aspect in that there are so many of these kinds of problems in math texts (there's even a theorem whose name implies heteronormative assumptions, Hall's marriage theorem), so I think it makes sense to discuss this here specifically.)

P.S.: Interestingly, there's no tag that contains “code” or “conduct”.

Answer 1

I share the sentiment but disagree with this being classified as a violation of the code of conduct.

Marriage equality is absent in most countries of the world and I found only six countries in which gender assignment at birth is not binary (the latter information was from 2013, much can have changed since.) At places where the law enforces heteronormativaty or gender binariness, using these categories might be simply acknowledgement of the legal situation without it being an endorsement.

Moreover, and I'm aware that this is a rather problematic argument, as far as gender issues are concerned this is probably not the issue to focus on. I don't want to put marginalized communities against each other, but it is already hard but proably more feasible in the current situation to keep reminding users that a user of unknown gender need not be male and that humanoids fitting in the binary scheme should probably not be classified as "men" and "girls."

Finally, it should be clear that one can offend without trying to offend ("Grandpa, you really shouldn't use that word.") but it is also much more effort to enforce rules about unconscious offenses. Let's improve the world in small steps.

Please note that this answer refers to enforcement of rules only. I do encourage pointing out implicit biases in formulations of questions and answers in comments. I would also like to point out that this is my personal opinion and not something that emerged as a consensus among site moderators.

Answer 2

Let's just stick to common sense and not attempt to find all possible reasons to get offended when it is rather obvious that no offense has been meant. We have had enough of liberal extremist nonsense in this world recently (recall the Tim Hunt story, to mention just one) to drag it to the mathematical sites. The common politeness and respect to "alternative lifestyles" is one thing and censoring the language is quite another.

Answer 3

I think this is a problem that we are ill-equipped to deal with, in that our actions (whatever they are) are unlikely to make a significant impact. The primary sources of these problems are professors, textbook authors, and practice problem websites, and while they produce these problems, we are going to get them on our site.

I don't think we should interpret these problems as a violation of the code of conduct. There is already a high bar for quality of questions, and an enormous volume of questions that do not meet this standard and have to be closed or deleted by the community.

Moreover, treating these problems as a violation of the code of conduct will punish the poor student who is just trying to get some help with their homework, and will have absolutely no effect on the aforementioned sources of these problems.

However, despite this, I'd prefer not to do nothing. If a question comes up that implicitly assumes binary gender or heterosexuality, I think we should try to make it an explicit assumption. We can use comments to ask for clarification, something along the lines of

Are you assuming every person in the problem is a man or woman?

or

Are you assuming that every marriage in the problem is between a man and a woman?

or something like that. If you get a positive response, then edit the question to include the assumption explicitly, e.g.

Assume, for the sake of the problem, that each person in consideration is a man or woman.

Not only is it clearer mathematically, but it demonstrates that we, as a community, recognise the queer community, and that while we host these problems with simplifying assumptions, they do not reflect our own assumptions in real life.

Answer 4

Everything in the second paragraph of Theoretical Economist's answer is true and important, and I could write a great deal about it from personal experience, including how it has severely affected my mathematical education.

On the other hand, were it not for its unfortunate use of the inflammatory phase "liberal extremist nonsense", I would also agree with every word of fedja's testy answer!

I do not feel the slightest bit personally offended or exluded by heteronormative or binary gender assumptions in mathematical word problems. [Is that the right term?] I don't even feel offended or hurt by this question (originally entitled "Preventing billiard ball mental patients from committing suicide"), even though I have attempted suicide and been a mental patient. It is genuinely amusing, and quite harmless. (As indeed are most of us loonies!) :)

More than that, I think it makes life worse, not better, for those of us in various marginalised groups if everybody is made constantly fearful that some abstract other individuals are liable to take offence at even the most innocent and natural assumptions, just because those assumptions are sometimes mistaken.

In mathematics, it's a damn nuisance, and pointless, to worry about putting the arguments of a binary operation in a certain order when the operation in question is known to be commutative. Of course one has to be prepared to treat noncommutative operations properly when they occur. I don't think mathematicians, of all people, need educating about this sort of thing!

The advice quoted from the code of conduct, "When in doubt, just don’t", is simplistic, wrong, and harmful. I'd much prefer people to be relaxed and commonsensical about the whole business. Again, I think fedja said it well.

Of course, as a self-confessed very odd bird indeed, I'm not representative of any class (marginalised or not), and I'm very much open to correction from any reader of MSE who belongs to some such marginalised group and does feel offended, excluded, or hurt by the kind of casual false assumptions in mathematical "word problems" that are being discussed in this thread.

[I've edited this, in the forlorn hope of preventing any more misunderstandings of what I meant!]

But is there actually any such person here?

Excuse me if I have missed something in this thread. (I think I read it all, but the subject understandably makes me nervous - I'm really going to regret posting this, by the way! - and my concentration may well have slipped.)

But my impression is of a lot of well-intentioned people worrying themselves to death (or angrily refusing to worry too much) over whether someone else might be offended. I think that much the best advice is "DON'T PANIC!" :)

Answer 5

I can do no better than to quote Pere's answer in the Math Educator's Stack Exchange thread:

The issue is not making problems about heterosexual married couples. The issues are:

• Implicitly making the assumption that all married couples are heterosexual.
• Making problems about heterosexual marriages but not about other kinds of couples.

Both points are [alienating to]* people following other types of marriage, but they can easily be solved while keeping the problem clear and interesting. We just need to make all assumptions explicit (thus acknowledging that they aren't universal while making the statement unambiguous) and making a wider array of problems (which can be useful to teach different tools).

Therefore, I do not think that posting a problem about heterosexual marriage requires a disclaimer that the author recognizes the problem is offensive. This is because it is easy to reword these problems so that they are not offensive by including language that makes it clear that heterosexual marriage is not the norm.

For example, instead of

There are 10 men and 10 women. How many ways are there for these 20 people to form 10 married couples?

Then if the intended answer is $10!$ rather than $19!!$, change the problem to

There are 10 men and 10 women. How many ways are there for these 20 people to form 10 heterosexual married couples?

*I rephrased this part, original wording was [unengaging for].

Answer 6

Regarding the fact the term "marriage" has two inequivalent common usages, I am inclined to treat the situation much like how we treat other terms with the same problem: infer meaning from context, clarify when needed, and maybe advise the author that the term is ambiguous.

Answer 7

I agree with your statement to some extent, but (paraphrasing one of your answers you linked to) I think it takes an extreme position that I believe would be harmful. It would mean that hardly any posts mentioning humans would be allowed at all.

For example, take this recent tweet (I replaced 'mathematicians' by 'guests' - see comments):

At a large dinner party, $n$ guests hang their coats on the coat rack as they enter. At the end of the night they leave in a drunken stupor, each one randomly putting on a coat without checking that it's their own. In the limit as $n \to \infty$, the probability that none of the guests staggers home in their own coat approaches $1/e$.

Clearly, this is "using language that assumes the non-existence of people" who do not wear coats, do not drink alcohol (e.g. many Muslims, recovering alcoholics, etc.) and/or cannot walk (e.g. have to use a wheelchair).

Or take this version of the dining philosophers problem (I replaced 'philosophers' by 'guests' - see comments):

A group of dinner guests sit around a table and eat spaghetti, each using two forks. However, only one fork is placed between each pair of adjacent guests. Each guest alternately drinks and eats. To drink, a guest puts down both forks, pours some wine into a glass, and drinks it. To eat, a guest picks up the fork on the left and the fork on the right, and eats. If one of the forks is not available, the guest waits until it becomes available. Will the guests be able to finish their meal?

How would you phrase this problem in a way that makes no implicit assumptions and does not exclude anyone, for example people who don't have two hands or for some other reason cannot use two forks, cannot eat food using their hands and mouth, cannot sit in a chair around a table, don't eat pasta, don't drink wine, and so on? (Stephen Hawking couldn't have been one of the dining philosophers, but I'd guess he wouldn't have felt excluded by the problem.)

Are problem statements like these "a form of discrimination", though "not a conscious or deliberate one"? Should "posting such a question without a critical reflection of this aspect violate the code of conduct"? I don't think so.

Answer 8

I'm of the same line of thinking as the OP. Personally I try to use "They", "Them", and so on in my answers, and in everyday conversation. I think it's important not to assume roles (I saw a post on MSE about a farmer that repeatedly referred to "him"), and generally it isn't too hard to be gender neutral.

HOWEVER, I do think that in historical problems such as the Hall's Marriage problem, and other similar combinatorics problems, we can take the assumptions of binary genders and heterosexual couples as given in the question as outdated and just move on with the maths.

In answer to the original question, there is no need to make this a breach on the code of conduct, but it is something we can all work on to make MSE less hetero-normative/binary. This could only be a good thing.

Answer 9

Who are these people getting alienated by the premise to a math word problem? Seriously? Meanwhile victims of actual racism/sexism around the world are being denied basic human rights ... some perspective is necessary.

heteronormative assumptions or assumptions about binary genders, e.g. questions about married couples that assume that these consist of female wives and male husbands, or questions about gender distributions in families that assume that all children are either male boys or female girls.

It's obvious to me that the point of a math "word problem" is the actual problem behind the words, not the story/setting created by the words.

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Edit: Thanks to Theo for explaining why my comparison to more severe problems was not relevant (strikethrough above).

That said, I think time spent editing questions to be more inclusive can easily instead be spent actually answering the math problem which just looks to me to be orders of magnitudes more important.

I'm open to changing my mind on that as well.

Answer 10

I partly disagree with Michael's answer. (Save the downvotes for when you've read the rest of my answer, please.) I believe that posts that use heteronormative language or contain implicit binary gender assumptions are clear-cut violations of the code of conduct.

I think we all need to try harder to appreciate how exclusionary and alienating it can be to be misgendered or to be told, even if only implicitly and unintentionally, that an important part of your identity is not normal or not real. This is hard for many of us to imagine, because many of us don't experience it. Moreover, even when we try to imagine the situation, it is difficult for us to imagine it in context. Bear in mind that being non-binary often means that you are deprived of rights afforded to otherwise identical heterosexual individuals. You might live in fear of being victim to violence because of who you are. Sometimes, it's more than just violence. It's no wonder that rates of depression and suicide are much higher among non-binary individuals than it is in the general population. It is this context that can, and often does, make it much more difficult to bear things that would otherwise seem like they would not be a big deal. (*)

However, I also think that strict enforcement of this type of violation is going to be an uphill battle, and likely to be counter-productive. Some of the other answers to this question give an indication of why: it's hard to enforce a rule that carries the penalties of suspension and expulsion when it involves behavior that a non-trivial number of people just don't think is a big deal. It is for this reason that I am personally not in favour of enforcing the code of conduct strictly in these cases.

What do I propose we do? I agree when Michael says that we should try to point out implicit biases in formulations of questions and answers in comments. However, I think we should go a little further than that. In particular, the appropriate help pages should state that we strongly encourage the use of non-heteronormative, gender-neutral language. I think that doing this might make compliance a little more likely. This way, it looks more like it's part of the rules of the site, rather than the appeals of some random stranger on the Internet. We should probably also have a short guide on how to do this. In my experience, this issue is a little tricky to navigate for people who are not proficient in English; a guide will help them do that.

I know it's a little inconvenient to try to rethink the language that you use to conform to what seems like a manifestation of political correctness gone mad. However, I hope that no one sincerely thinks that it is important to them that they not have to do so. On the other hand, the more careful use of language is important to many non-binary people. Let's try to make Math SE a place for them too.

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(*) There is also the argument that use of heteronormative language is an important part of what engenders an environment that enables the worst aggressions outlined above, but I'll leave that for alone for now. However, you can read about this argument here or here.