Is English Gender-neutral?

I constructed the word-histograms for the texts of the 100 books most downloaded over the last 30 days from Project Gutenberg. For the context see my posts on Numerical Text Analysis. Here is a summary and the top 10 words ranked by frequency of occurrence:

Corpus = Top100 in Project Gutenberg

If you think that English is a gender-neutral language, think again.  

Occurrences of 3rd person singular personal pronouns

The masculine pronouns occur almost thrice as often as the feminine ones, consistently for both the subject pronouns (she/he) and the combined (after stemming) possessive (her/hers/his) and object (her/him) pronouns. The proportion of use of the possessive and object pronouns vs. the subject pronouns seems (without running a statistical test) about the same for both genders; were the proportion of object pronouns to be higher for any gender one could interpret it as evidence of objectification of that gender. 

Shouldn't this be called feminist mathematics - mathematics applied to gender studies?, rather than the idiocies and nonsense spouted by the likes of Sandra Harding? I recall reading an essay possibly co-authored by her in the late 1990s on 'feminist mathematics', years after the Alan Socal Social Text hoax. Does anyone know this article? It is a little unfair to keep attacking her 1986 book, even though her 2006 book seems not to show any increased knowledge of science or maths. Poor little kupamanduka. There are biases against girls in math classrooms in the US, and when you google "feminism mathematics" you get mostly references to studies addressing those and other pedagogical biases in math - not what I am taking issue with in this paragraph. 

For another application of  my kind of feminist math, look at my post on sexism in one professional network.

A final aside: I've been reading Amartya Sen's The Conciliatory Indian, and based on one footnote, I think that the sokaled "Project Gutenberg" should really be called "Project Diamond Sutra" honoring the first dated printed book.

“When the Doctor no longer looks like You, White Boy.”

When the Doctor Doesn’t Look Like You

The full column should have been titled “When the Doctor no longer looks like You, White Boy.”. Women and non-white people have long contended with doctors who don’t look like them. What is more, white male doctors have long dismissed symptoms, in American women and African-American patients, which the doctors take seriously enough for white male patients.

Other than the overt racism and sexism inherent in patients and colleagues discriminating against non white male doctors, there is the covert racism and sexism in taking this issue seriously only when the affected patients are white males (as the title of the full column implies).

Gratuitous sexism alive and well amongst MDs in 21st century

Tara Parker Pope's blog on health on the NYT, 8 feb 2010, on the retraction of Lancet article linking MMR vaccine and autism:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/did-the-media-inflame-the-vaccine-autism-link/#comment-476425

Comment #3 : In psychiatry long enough to have seen diagnostic fads come and go. Strongly suspect there’s a large subset of children diagnosed as autistic who merely suffer from a lack of maternal attention from busy working mothers and too much day care.

— MARK KLEIN, M.D. My response: In response to #3 Mark Klein’ s time-travelling email from the 1950’s:

“lack of maternal attention from busy working mothers”!
Lets try and rephrase that for the 21st century: “lack of parental attention from busy working parents”.
So how come so many of the kids diagnosed with autism seem to be children of white suburban full-time moms?

Anything else you want to blame it on: Rising illegal immigration; Increasing number of ignorant M.D.s?

— Ranjeet Tate

Letter to Tom Ashbrook and On Point on "Polanski"

In response to an interview with Henri-Levy and Ferraro:

I'd like to state that I am in favor of extraditing Polanski and making him stand trial. There are three points I would like to make:

1) Even though his victim has pardoned him, which she is welcome to do, she should no longer interfere with the criminal case. In India, bigamy is illegal for Hindus and it is a crime for Hindu men to have more than one wife. However, it can't be prosecuted and has almost never been prosecuted because only the injured party or someone with standing in the case can file a police complaint or file charges. In the case of bigamy, this translates into this responsibility being put on the first wife, who is all too often either submissive, subjugated or financially totally dependent on her husband.

2) Ferraro points out that Polanski's status should not affect the decision to prosecute or not. However, hypocrisy in prosecuting crimes or in access to justice is nothing new: when the Americans sign on to the International Criminal Court, and begin to prosecute those Americans who broke the law on torture (be they ex-Presidents or film-makers) and those soldiers and mercenaries who continue to commit crimes in Iraq and cooperate with international justice, perhaps it will then be easier for the Europeans to swallow the Americans' sanctimonius arguments about "no one is above the law".

3) Polanski should be tried not because "he is vile" but because he has broken the law. Judgments of character should not interfere with judgments of action - lest we fall into the fascist and hierarchical trap of letting the "good" people off the hook for their misdeeds - ranging from massacres during fascist Spain to rapes by high caste men against low caste women in rural India.