THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
THE EFFECTS OF THE LACK OF A GENDER-NEUTRAL SINGULAR PRONOUN ON BUSINESS COMMUNICATION
KRISTINA PESZEL FALL 2014
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in English with honors in English
Reviewed and approved* by the following:
Craig Warren Associate Professor of English & Professional Writing Thesis Supervisor and Honors Adviser
Mary Connerty Senior Lecturer in English Faculty Reader
* Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College.
i
ABSTRACT
The English language suffers from a noticeable lack of an epicene pronoun. This absence has lead speakers of English to implement several different techniques to ameliorate this gap with varying degrees of success and acceptance. Because the language’s pronoun system is based on gender, pronoun usage has been of enduring interest to feminists, culminating in feminist linguistic scholarship and advocacy. With this linguistic and sociopolitical context, this study uses corpus linguistics to examine business documents from several well-known technology companies to analyze how the technology sector approaches gender via application of gender pronouns. Samples from the corpus whose meaning is negatively affected by the lack of an epicene pronoun are then replaced with gender-neutral neologisms and singular they pronouns to study change in meaning and connotation.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables ...... iii
Acknowledgements ...... iv
Chapter 1 Linguistic Context: ...... 1
Chapter 2 Sociolinguistic Context – Feminist Linguistics ...... 5
False Gender-Neutrality in English ...... 6 Sex Marking in English ...... 8 Lexical Marking: Creating Gender Asymmetry ...... 9 Feminist Linguistics in Relation to this Thesis ...... 9
Chapter 3 Corporate Demographics ...... 11
Chapter 4 Methodology ...... 13
Chapter 5 Corpus Findings ...... 16
You ...... 16 Nominative: He/She/We ...... 17 Accusative: Him/Her ...... 20 Possessive Determiner: His/Her ...... 23 Corpus Conclusions ...... 25
Chapter 6 Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Business Documents ...... 26
Specific Gender – Negative Context ...... 27 Replace with Ne Pronouns ...... 27 Replace with Singular They ...... 28 Specific Gender – Authority Figure ...... 28 Replace with Ne Pronouns ...... 29 Replace with Singular They ...... 30 Ambiguous Gender Construction ...... 30 Replace with Ne Pronouns ...... 31 Replace with Singular They ...... 32
Chapter 7 Conclusions ...... 34
Chapter 8 Future Research ...... 37
Appendix A Corpus Frequency Charts ...... 38
iii
Appendix B Text Samples from Chapter 6 ...... 40
Example 1: Yahoo’s Code of Ethics ...... 40 Original ...... 40 Ne ...... 41 Singular They ...... 41 Example 2: Valve Corporation’s Employee Handbook ...... 42 Original ...... 42 Ne ...... 42 Singular They ...... 42 Example 3: Yahoo’s Corporate Governance ...... 43 Original ...... 43 Ne ...... 43 Singular They ...... 43
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 45
ACADEMIC VITA ...... 48
iv
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Third Person Pronoun Categories ...... 1 Table 2. Invented Pronouns ...... 3 Table 3. Gender of Global Employees at Tech Companies ...... 12
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Craig Warren and Dr. Mary Connerty for their dedication and guidance in the writing of this thesis. I am truly grateful for every piece of feedback and every new idea they brought to my attention. Without their reassurance—and patience—I am not sure this work could have materialized. I would also like to thank Dr. Sarah Whitney for helping me find some of my most invaluable sources.
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Chapter 1
Linguistic Context:
Third person pronouns in modern day standard English can be broken down into five main forms: nominative, accusative, genitive, reflexive, and dative. In addition to these cases, pronouns can be assigned one of three “genders”: these genders are masculine, feminine, and neuter. Although the plural form is not a gender, it does have its own declension and is also neuter. Explanations and examples of these forms and their declensions can be found below in
Table 1.
Table 1: Third Person Pronoun Categories
Although English does have a singular neuter pronoun (it), it is not used to refer to people because of its common usage in referring to inanimate objects. Saint Ridley Santos notes: “The way English works now, the neuter singular is not a viable option for a gender-neutral pronoun for people—its connotation rest entirely with the non-human, so to use the neuter is a
2 dehumanizing prospect, even if technically correct from a strict grammatical point of view” (par.
5). This lack of an epicene pronoun is a pronounced hole in the English language. There are three often suggested solutions to remedy this absence:
1) Use singular masculine gender pronouns as singular neuter 2) Use plural gender pronouns as singular neuter 3) Use a construction of masculine and feminine gender pronouns (he/she, he or she, etc.)
All three suggested solutions have inherent flaws. The first solution was proposed as early as the eighteenth century when grammarians first began challenging the use of plural neuter pronouns as also singular, a phenomenon that was actually quite common in the English language (Baron
83). This first solution is gender-specific and, according to Jennifer Saul, philosopher of language and feminism, “there is good psycholinguistic evidence that those who encounter sentences…using the terms ‘he’ and ‘man’ think more readily of males than of females” (par. 5).
The next solution, use of the plural gender pronoun, predates use of singular masculine gender pronouns to represent singular neuter—but was disputed due to its violation of number concord
(Baron 83). This violation results in a lack of clarity; due to plural gender pronouns’ association as strictly plural (however, this association is from a prescriptivist grammar perspective—they is actually often used colloquially as singular gender-neutral), texts using singular they may cause confusion and could result in a lack of clarity. The final suggestion, while correct in number and neutrality, remains a clumsy, cumbersome construction. In addition to its unappealing style, it forces gender into a strict binary, ignoring the possibility of a broad gender spectrum and, in turn, alienating those who do not perceive themselves as strictly “male” or “female.” While the first solution is the one considered to be the most grammatically correct by prescriptive grammarians, it is also the least effective of the three.
3 One solution beyond the three most often suggested is the creation of an epicene pronoun. Such neologisms have been introduced as far back as the 1850s but have lacked any real staying power (Baron 87). Despite this history, new contenders have continuously emerged; the most recently proffered include Ne, Ve, Spivak, Ze, and Xe (Gender-Neutral). See Table 2 for example usage of these pronouns.
Table 2: Invented Pronouns Courtesy of "The Need for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun" post from the Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog
The most common barriers to adoption of these neologisms include difficult or confusing pronunciation, the risk of words bleeding into one another in speech (for example, ze could
4 easily bleed into another word that ends with “-s,” such as the example “Is ze?”), overall public ignorance of these terms’ existence, and people’s unwillingness to insert a new word into their daily lexicon (Gender-Neutral).
Despite these somewhat daunting obstacles, such factors do not make adoption impossible; in April 2012, Sweden officially added the singular gender-neutral pronoun hen to its online National Encyclopedia (Rothschild par. 5) and in April 2015 it will be added to the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, an organization which is “seen as the final arbiter of the
Swedish language” (Radio Sweden). Initially proposed in the 1960s, and again in the 90s, hen was a suggested solution to the unwieldy gender neutral constructions in language, such as he/she and he or she that are used to maintain gender neutrality in texts and spoken language
(Rothschild par. 7). Today, hen is officially defined as “a third sex, used to refer to transgender individuals, or as a personal pronoun that is neither male nor female. It can also be used when the gender of the referred to person is not known” (Radio Sweden par. 1). The creation and national adoption of a singular gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish—as well as its use to break the idea of gender as a strict dichotomy—is particularly noteworthy due to the fact that English and Swedish have similar gender binary-based pronoun systems (St. Ridley Santos par. 36). As was mentioned earlier, English neologisms for gender-neutral pronouns have been created since the
1850s. If a Swedish neologism can gain enough traction within fifty years—with the majority of its popularity growing between 2012 and 2014—to become not only widely used but officially accepted, it is hard to see why English could not similarly implement an official gender-neutral pronoun that would make the language more precise and augment our understanding of gender as more complex than a simple binary.
5 Chapter 2
Sociolinguistic Context – Feminist Linguistics
The basic tenet of feminism is the belief that inequality exists between the sexes. While feminism has many different forms and flavors, this idea is the integral base of all feminist ideologies. Because of this foundational belief, female presence—or lack thereof—in the
English language has been a field of enduring interest to many feminists. Sara Mills notes:
Feminist linguistic analysis started with a concern about social issues. Women
began to analyse the systematic discrimination against women and, because of
their background in language analysis, began to see ways in which language itself
could be analysed to give insight into inequality…. In short, individuals are
positioned in and through the language and discursive resources available within a
particular society. By analysing those linguistic resources it is possible to
describe the way that women are systematically differentially treated and then go
on to challenge the patterns in linguistic usage which are discriminatory or which
are not in women’s (or men’s) interest. (7-8)
Feminist linguistics looks at how language and gender interact with and affect each other. The aims of this discourse are not to achieve equal opportunity for women per se but to “expose inequalities and propose changes” (Mills 8). For the purposes of this thesis, I will present a brief overview of feminist linguistic theories that relate to the English language’s gender-based pronoun system.
6 False Gender-Neutrality in English
The use of masculine pronouns to represent gender neutrality in texts has long been a cause of concern for feminists. Many argue that it is a “false gender-neutrality,” and that “even the supposed gender-neutral meanings of these terms are not really gender neutral” (Saul par. 2).
This means that in certain contexts, when used as gender-neutral, masculine terms look and feel out of place, signaling that they are not truly gender neutral. Saul offers as an example the following sentences that seem dramatically at odds with the notion that the masculine form can adequately be used in a truly gender-neutral fashion:
5. Man has two sexes; some men are female.
6. Man breastfeeds his young.
7. Ask the candidate about his husband or wife.
In the above examples, something seems intrinsically “off” in each sentence. In example 5, the reader stumbles upon what, at first glance, appears to be an oxymoron; as the gender binary is commonly regarded as “fact,” the average reader may immediately question how some men are female, leading to confusion and misunderstanding. In example 6, man is ascribed to a strictly female phenomenon—that of breastfeeding—and would likely also lead to reader confusion.
Finally, in example 7, we see that using his gender neutrally also causes confusion when directly followed by husband or wife. This ambiguity would likely be construed as questioning the male candidate’s sexual preference—does he have a husband or wife—rather than leaving the candidate’s gender ambiguous. These three example sentences show that the male gender cannot truly be used as both masculine and gender neutral. Janice Moulton performs a similar linguistic exercise by juxtaposing “Socrates is a man” with “Sophia is a man” and notes that replacing the
7 male name with a female one “makes it false, or insulting. It is not taken to mean that Sophia is a member of the human species” (109). Moulton explains:
The meaning of a term is not determined by the interpretation of one person
alone. How others will understand it must be considered as well. Although some
people might argue that in this context the syllogism "Sophia is a man" can be
read as "Sophia is a human being," they will recognize that many other people
will not take it this way (this is due in part to our inability to use "man" to refer to
a female in other contexts). Although some people might be able to read "man"
neutrally in this context, it does not follow that this is what it means. (109)
Because meaning relies on, to some extent, general consensus of interpretation, merely claiming that the masculine gender serves as both masculine and neutral without the ability to serve as a neutral referent for woman discredits this notion. Moulton continues by extending this argument to masculine pronouns:
Alleged neutral uses of "he" are not as frequently found in syllogisms. But if it
sounds strange to ask an applicant about the interests of his husband or wife, to
instruct a child on the cleaning of his vagina or penis, or to compliment a guest on
his gown or tuxedo, then something is less than neutral about "he" and "his" as
well. Note that there is no ambiguity about these uses. The contexts make it clear
that "man" and "his" are supposed to be understood to be gender-neutral, if
possible. (111)
8 Yet, this reading is impossible or, at the very least, unlikely. Thus, masculine forms cannot adequately fill the language’s lack of a singular gender-neutral form. Attempts to use it as a purely neutral gender result in confusion and misunderstanding. This issue relates to another problem feminist linguistics have pointed out: the English language obligates its speakers and writers to participate in “sex marking.”
Sex Marking in English
Sex marking is a way to denote sex in language; in natural gender languages, such as
English, this is often done by consistently using sex-marking pronouns (Stahlberg et al. 167).
The language’s use of sex marking via pronouns is problematic in that it highlights its own inflexibility in referring to people in any way other than their biological sex due to its singular personal pronoun system, despite any perceived irrelevancy of sex on a particular subject (Saul par. 9). Feminists see as a major marker of sexism the language’s necessity to inject the subject of biological sex into any and all mention of individuals. Frye proposes that “the constant need to know and indicate sex helps to perpetuate the conviction that sex is a tremendously important matter in all areas”; she also contends that this focus on sex perpetuates male dominance in that
“male dominance requires the belief that men and women are importantly different from each other, so anything that contributes to the impression that sex differences are important is therefore a contributor to male dominance” (Saul par. 9). This theory suggests that the English language contributes to and enforces male dominance. If language shapes our perception of reality, it is not a far stretch to suggest that any explicit misogynist tendencies of the language could perpetuate misogynist tendencies in our reality.
9 Lexical Marking: Creation of Gender Asymmetry
Lexical marking, with regard to gender, occurs when genderless words are modified to denote gender; when done unnecessarily, it creates gender asymmetry (Prewitt-Freilino et al.
270). This gender asymmetry is present through the English language, especially when discussing female participation in authoritative or important roles. Female presence in such roles is often called attention to by emphasizing their gender via lexical marking, accentuating their participation as an anomaly. This accentuation can be seen with words that attach morphemes denoting gender, such as actress, and with genderless words that explicitly state gender by appending an additional word, such as lady doctor, as examples of gender asymmetry. Some feminists posit that because these occupations are traditionally viewed as “masculine,” as they are positions of authority, female participation in these types of occupations must be highlighted either by a different title that explicitly states the individual’s gender (such as actress) or be modified to explicitly state gender (such as lady doctor). In the case of actress, the morpheme – ess is used to refer to a feminine form of a “masculine” word, suggesting that actor is inherently masculine. The explicit qualifier lady doctor seems to also suggest that doctor is inherently
“masculine” but lacks a “female” form. While gender asymmetry does not overtly relate to gender-neutral pronouns, it does relate to the issue of gender inequality in the English language and can serve as a potential indication of gender bias in the writer or speaker.
Feminist Linguistics in Relation to this Thesis
Feminist linguistics focuses on disparities in representation between genders. While this brief overview only scratches the surface of the wealth of research on this complex and
10 burgeoning field, it gives necessary background to the topic of gendered pronouns and usage in business writing within a sector that maintains a notable gender gap.
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Chapter 3
Corporate Demographics
While technology companies are known for their innovation, they are also known for a noticeable gender gap in their technical employees. Because of this intriguing convergence of characteristics, this study focuses on some of the most well-known technology companies today including Google, Facebook, IBM, Twitter, Valve, and Yahoo. While not all of the companies used in the corpus have made their employee demographics publicly available, Google,
Facebook, and Yahoo have done so. Table 3 shows the percentages of male and female employees by company. I would also like to note that companies throughout the rest of this study will be referred to by the singular they pronoun. This choice was made due to the fact that companies are regarded as singular entities by the law, yet have no gender. This decision in and of itself is yet another illustration of the confines the lack of an epicene pronoun imposes upon our language.
Table 3: Gender of Global Employees at Tech Companies Information courtesy of Alison Griswold, staff writer at Slate
12 These numbers show that men make up between 60-70% of all employees, and 80-85% of all technical employees. This means that women make up a meager 30-40% of all employees at these technology companies and an even more dismal 15-20% of their technical employees
(Griswold). Google, the first of the companies to disclose this information publicly, admitted that they are “miles from where [they] want to be,” and Facebook expressed similar sentiments stating “diversity is essential to achieving our mission [but] we have more work to do—a lot more” (Griswold par. 3). However bleak these numbers look, women are making strides in technology companies. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and IBM are public companies—of these five, IBM and Yahoo have female CEOs, and Facebook has a female chief operating officer and director. Despite the numbers listed in the table, women are starting to hold top management positions in some of the most influential and well-known technology companies, showing that the gender ceiling in the technology industry, although sturdy, is penetrable. Many of these companies have acknowledged an awareness of the gender gap among its technical employees and have promised to address the issue.
As was discussed earlier, language plays an important role in not only how we communicate with others, but also in how we communicate ourselves to others. Inasmuch as we shape language, language shapes our perceptions of reality. The reality of these companies—at least, the reality they communicate to the public—is that there is a palpable gender gap that they are trying to fill.
13 Chapter 4
Methodology
To examine gender pronoun usage in business documents, I compiled a specialized, synchronic corpus of nine business documents from leading companies in the technology industry. This means the corpus is from a particular genre and place (specialized), as well as from a specific point in time (synchronic). The documents were taken from IBM, Yahoo,
Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Valve; these companies come from a variety of subsectors within the technology industry including corporate technology, social media, video game development, and the web portal/search engine sector. The types of in-house documents tested were corporate governance guidelines, business/code of conduct/code of ethics manuals, and an employee handbook. The length of the documents ranged from as few as 1,840 words to as many as 11,620; however, overall total word count by company is a somewhat smaller range from 3,092 words to 13,035—the low end of the range is due to the fact that only one document could be found for Facebook.
I chose to focus on the technology industry for two reasons: 1) as seen above, the technology sector has a wide variety of subsectors ranging from traditional, white collar corporations, such as IBM, to companies on the vanguard of innovation itself, such as Google, and even companies with increasingly progressive views on corporate hierarchy and management, such as Valve; and 2) the technology industry overall is viewed as more progressive and culturally accepting than other industries. The progressive atmosphere lends itself well to successful experimentation and innovation not only with their own products—take, for example, Google’s revolutionary Google Glasses—but potentially also in something as integral, yet inconspicuous as their company language. This atmosphere coupled with the broad
14 diversity of subsectors in this industry create an exceptional environment in which to examine different approaches to and any potential shifts in language—particularly with regard to the
English language’s lack of a singular gender-neutral pronoun.
A corpus approach was taken to this study for a number of reasons. Corpus linguistics, with the aid of computers, offer a way to quickly and precisely determine the frequency of certain words and phrases in language in a systematic, reliable manner (McEnery and Wilson
15). In this case, a concordance software known as AntConc was able to swiftly tabulate the number of instances of certain gender-specific pronouns within each document of my compiled corpus. This type of linguistic study focuses on “language as choice,” meaning importance is placed on the performance of language rather than just language competency (McEnery and
Wilson 8). This is particularly important in this study because not only can competency be assumed, but particular care in wording can also be assumed; business documents are written with great care and precision because they represent the voice of the company. According to
Lancaster University: “Large amounts of data tell us about tendencies and what’s normal or typical in real-life language use” (Leech 6). Corpus linguistics can even feed into contextual analyses: the frequency of certain words can be further analyzed within the context of their usage to understand both how often we use certain words and how we use these certain words. A corpus approach gives objective, verifiable data on frequency, while contextual analysis offers insight into the way words are used; both techniques are necessary for a well-rounded, incisive examination of language use.
Business documents are among the most “self-aware” of texts—every word must be carefully considered for all potential meaning because it is the “voice” of the company. If a company’s language is misconstrued, it can lead to misunderstandings at best and lost customers
15 and litigation at worst. This means that in theory, the way a company approaches the lack of a singular gender-neutral pronoun signals their approach to gender in general. In reference to personal address studies, Jolane Flanigan observes that “as people use third person pronouns to refer to others, they also convey messages about who they are and how they should relate” (29).
In a sense, business documents reference their companies themselves. If this argument can be extended to business documents, then a company’s approach to gender neutrality in business documents conveys the business’s own perspective on the matter and how others should relate to the company.
16 Chapter 5
Corpus Findings
This study focused on the nominative and accusative cases as well as possessive determiners; the following words in particular were run against the corpus to determine frequency of use: him, his, her, he, she, you, and we. The following sections will define the case—or, in the case of the possessive determiners, sub-class of determiners—and note how many times each word was used total. For explicit breakdowns of the words by company and total word count per document and per company, please refer to Appendix A.
You
The pronoun you is a second-person personal pronoun; it can be used in both the nominative and accusative cases, with your functioning as a possessive determiner. All of the documents—as well as most business and technical documents written today—use this personal pronoun to refer to the reader rather than using the indefinite pronoun one. In the corpus documents, you occurs 530 times. The breakdown of these occurrences, which can also be found in Appendix A, is as follows: Facebook Code of Conduct: 44, Google Code of Conduct: 107,
Twitter Code of Business Conduct & Ethics: 46, Valve Employee Manual: 206, and Yahoo Code of Ethics: 127. When averaged out, the use of you makes up between 1.4 – 1.8% of the total words used. This can be compared to companies’ self-reference within their own documents
(i.e., Facebook using the company name “Facebook” within their own document). Half of these companies—Yahoo, Twitter, and Valve—fall within a range of 1.6% to 1.7%, while the other half—IBM, Google, and Facebook—fall within a range of 2.3% to 3.3%. This means that the
17 reader is referred to either equal to or half as often as the companies refer to themselves in their own documents.
Nominative: He/She/We
The nominative case encompasses subject words—these words function as the agent of the predicate, meaning they perform the action of the predicate or receive what is assigned to them via the predicate. He, she, and we are all nominative pronouns. In total, he was used 12 times, while she was used 12. We was used 370 times total. Eight instances of the masculine and feminine forms were used together as in he or she or he/she. This leaves four instances of the word he not used with she, and vice versa. All four uses of standalone he come from Valve
Corporation; these uses of he all refer to founder/president Gabe Newell, with the exception of one instance, which refers to Josh Weier, another employee of Valve. In the following selection,
Valve’s employee manual highlights the company’s balanced decision-making policy by illustrating that even Newell is not given license to make final decisions on his own:
Gabe is the first to say that he can’t be right nearly often enough for us to operate
that way. His decisions and requests are subject to just as much scrutiny and
skepticism as anyone else’s. (So if he tells you to put a favorite custom knife
design into Counter-Strike, you can just say no.) (12)
18 Most employee manuals do not call attention to specific employees, especially not in as personal a way as Valve, making this manual seem interesting and innovative. This innovation comes at a price, however. The manual does not appear to have a standalone she. This immediately raises questions: Does Valve have any female employees of value? Do they value any of their female employees? Do they even have any female employees? While this might appear to edge into the realm of hypersensitivity, one must question why more attention is paid to the male employees at Valve than the female employees. If language shapes our perception, is this Valve’s perception? For all of Valve’s conscientiousness towards language—evident in the way they have written their employee manual—their lack of attention to female employees is immediately evident. While eventually they do mention a female employee, she notably works in a nontechnical position.
All instances of standalone she come from Yahoo; however, unlike Valve’s positive usage of he to refer to specific employees, Yahoo’s usage of she are all negative and, ironically, all come from its Code of Ethics document:
Q: A former member of my team called to ask me for some copies of materials
we worked on together when she was at Yahoo. As we talked, I realized that she
still had some data we used on the project. I told her I’d call her back – now
what?
A: First, don’t provide copies of the materials she requested. You may be in
violation of the Code by doing so. She may have violated the Code by taking
Yahoo confidential and/or proprietary information, and there could be other issues
19 if she shared this information with others. Contact your manager, the ECO, or the
Legal Department for guidance. (20)
All four instances refer to this scenario in the Q & A section in which an employee may be in violation of the code of ethics. The inclusion of a specific gender in this instance stands out dramatically, especially when considered within the rest of the text—and with Yahoo’s other business documents—which all consistently use he or she constructions. Curiously, despite
Yahoo’s usage of he or she throughout its documents, it does not rewrite the scenario with this gender-neutral construction. It is unlikely that this could be chalked up to mere oversight due to its usage within a code of ethics manual, a manual that must be carefully edited for language choice.
The use of both masculine and feminine together to denote gender neutrality is a stylistic choice that all companies used for the nominative case with the exception of Google, who was able to write their document without masculine and feminine nominative case. This choice is an interesting one because these companies sacrifice brevity for gender equality. However, it could also be argued that in addition to succinctness, these companies also sacrifice style as the construction he or she as well as he/she is visually cumbersome.
We had a frequency of 370 yet was only found in six of the nine documents, including three code of conducts, one policy document (which lists business conduct and ethics), one business conduct document, and one employee handbook. We is used to refer to the respective companies in these instances. This usage of first person rather than third (i.e., “We believe” versus “Google believes”) relates back to personal address studies; by using the more personal first person plural grammatical person, these companies confer a very specific way of interacting
20 with the reader, and suggests that they are inclusive rather than exclusive. First person plural is more inclusive than third person because first person plural is more ambiguous about clusivity, while third person is strictly exclusive.
Accusative: Him/Her
The accusative case encompasses object words—these words function as the direct object of transitive verbs, meaning that the predicate is performed upon them (or, in other words, they receive the action). Him and her are both accusative pronouns. Altogether, him was used a total of five times. Of these five times, four of these instance were from Valve and one was from
Yahoo’s Corporate Governance document. Two of the five instances were constructions of him or her—one of these constructions was found within Valve’s document, and the other was found in Yahoo’s document. The three uses of him that were not attached to or her all come from
Valve and refer to employees Josh Weier and Erik Wolpaw. This leaves one instance that does not follow the typical construction of him or her or follow Valve’s usage of pronouns to refer to specific employees. This instance is striking for its usage to refer to a gender-neutral noun:
Manager—The kind of people we don’t have any of. So if you see one, tell
somebody, because it’s probably the ghost of whoever was in this building before
us. Whatever you do, don’t let him give you a presentation on paradigms in
spectral proactivity. (56)
21 The standalone usage of him in Valve’s employee handbook refers to a manager. Considering the disproportionate number of men to women in these roles in the technology sector, the usage of him, inadvertent or not, reinforces this statistic. Although Valve refers to managers in a derogatory manner and most likely used him in a desultory fashion, it is still somewhat disquieting that a company that prides itself on being so progressive still falls into the habit of automatically assigning men positions of power rather than women. This standalone usage of him cannot be chalked up to the once popular usage of him as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, either—Valve uses the construction him or her within their document, so to suddenly switch to him as represent a neutral gender would show carelessness and inconsistency on their behalf.
Despite the negative connotations that are implied with the term manager within this company, one must question the sudden usage of standalone him rather than the construction of him or her found not only within Valve’s own document, but that also appears to be standard across documents within the technology sector. While the usage of her instead of him would not remedy this situation either, it seems odd that Valve would suddenly allow their reputation for being progressive and egalitarian to be put into question for a pithy joke about managerial hierarchy.
While him was only used five times, her was used 32 times; however, because her is used in both the accusative and genitive cases, the 32 instances of her is not remarkable, particularly when matched against the 29 instances of him found throughout the documents. The accusative her was found five times in the documents. Four of these instances of are unaccompanied by his.
Of these occurrences, two are found in the aforementioned code of ethics transgression from
Yahoo; one appears in another code of ethics example from Yahoo—this example will be
22 discussed in further detail in the section on possessive determiners; and one appears in Valve’s employee handbook.
Valve’s instance of standalone her follows their pattern of referring to specific employees: “If you find yourself working long hours, or just generally feel like that [work/life] balance is out of whack, be sure to raise the issue with whomever you feel would help. Dina loves to force people to take vacations, so you can make her your first stop” (17, 19). This mention of Dina Nelson is the only time Valve mentions a female employee by name. As this selection suggestions, Dina is a non-technical employee who works in human resources. Valve’s site describes her thusly:
Dina has a degree in “Human Rehabilitation.” She rehabilitates humans in the
software industry by bringing them to Valve, where their brains, bodies, and
families are rejuvenated after having been oppressed by various working
conditions elsewhere. Not content with dispensing the obvious perks like a
rewarding work environment and fat paychecks, Dina spoils us by employing an
army of fringe benefit specialists to boost the rehab magic. (Valve Software)
Valve, again, uses humor, transparency, and intimacy to draw people in whether they are new employees or potential customers. While this makes their documents enjoyable to read and gives the company its own personality—almost its own voice—it simultaneously, and contradictorily, conceals and highlights the unequal visibility of its male and female workers. Because the document is entertaining, the reader may not notice the unequal representation of male and female workers. Or, the reader may notice yet ignore the issue because the handbook appears to
23 be hip and progressive due to its high transparency and intimacy. Yet even if this underrepresentation is called to the reader’s attention, a particularly defensive reader could lash out by saying that this sort of reading reads further into the text than what is actually there.
However, why is there no representation of a female technical employee, especially when multiple male technical employees, even besides the founder, are highlighted? Is it really a fluke that the only female employee mentioned is an employee from human resources, a role that is more likely to be associated with a woman than a technical role? One may wonder why a company that is so eager to present itself as egalitarian does not give equal attention to female technical employees.
Possessive Determiner: His/Her
Possessive determiners encompasses (pro)nouns that modify other nouns, most often showing possession. His and her are both possessive determiners. His was found a total of 29 times in the documents and her, not including its use in the accusative case, was used a total of
27 times. Of these instances, three occurrences of his are not accompanied by or her or /her. All instances of standalone his are found in Valve’s employee handbook and follow Valve’s penchant for referring to specific employees. In this case, these three instances refer to Mike
Harrington and Gabe Newell.
Of the 27 uses of possessive determiner her, one is standalone. This instance of standalone, possessive determiner her was found in Yahoo’s Code of Ethics document:
24 Q: A friend of mine is running for political office, and I would like to help her
out with her campaign. Is there a problem with this?
A: No. Your personal support is your personal business. Just make sure you do
not use Yahoo assets – including Yahoo company time or the Yahoo name – to
advance the campaign.
This is a particularly interesting selection because it uses the female possessive determiner, as well as the female gender genitive pronoun, without being attached to a male gender possessive determiner. Not only is the female determiner given possession, but it is given possession of a noun that is—or was in the past—most often associated with men: campaign—explicitly, political office. So this example is dealing with a woman in a position of power. While Yahoo’s use of standalone she was used in an overwhelmingly negative way, this instance of standalone her is more complicated. By allowing the example to remain a woman’s campaign for political office, it depicts a woman with power. However, although the female is allowed to “keep” this power, she is still in a position where she may cause a violation of Yahoo’s Code of Ethics.
Ultimately, Yahoo rules that this instance is not in violation of their code of ethics. Despite the theoretical argument of whether using standalone her rather than a construction of his or her is a progressive tactic or not, any potential misreading or “over” reading could be avoided by using a binary gender construction or, if a standardized gender-neutral pronoun existed, any notion of gender bias could be easily mitigated.
25 Corpus Conclusions
There are still inequalities in the way women and men are represented and referred to, even in a sector that is believed to be more progressive than most. While 47 male pronouns to 44 female pronouns does not necessarily denote a problem explicitly, the uses found in the documents lead a reader to wonder why—when a standalone gendered pronoun was used—one gender is chosen over another. In the case of Valve, this is obviously because specific employees are referenced; however, it is worth noting that the male employees referenced were technical employees, while the one female employee referenced was a nontechnical employee.
In Yahoo’s Code of Ethics document, the gendered pronouns that existed in the original submissions of the questions in the Q & A section were left unedited. In this case, the reader must ponder why Yahoo would decide not to change these gendered pronouns to a binary pronoun construction. The gender of the people in these particular situations added no pertinent additional information to the scenarios, leaving the perpetrator of possible code violation often gendered female without any added benefit. In all of these situations in these documents, could the use of one gendered pronoun over another signal that the document authors are careless, oblivious, or worse: aware and inconsiderate? While this corpus analysis cannot pretend to adequately answer this question, it does call attention to the need for either increased careful consideration of word choice, message, and audience or the need for an ambiguous gender pronoun.
26 Chapter 6
Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Business Documents
Although writers for these businesses have found ways to circumvent the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun, their solutions merely avoid the problem rather than solve it. In an effort to find a solution, rather than a workaround, I tested the effectiveness of using a gender- neutral pronoun neologism by replacing gendered pronouns and pronoun constructions with the ne form of gender-neutral pronouns and then, in turn, replacing the pronouns with singular they.
I did this in an effort to test the effects of replacing gendered pronouns with non-gendered pronouns to see if meaning—both implicit and explicit—changed. Ne pronouns were chosen for this exercise because of their high degree of gender neutrality (some neologisms more closely resemble one gender declension over another), ease of reading/pronunciation, and contrast among other pronouns. The declension of the pronoun is as follows: ne (he/she; subject), nem
(him/her; object), nir (his/her; possessive determiner), nirs (his/hers; possessive pronoun), and nemself (himself/herself; reflexive). After testing ne, I used the same samples of text to test singular they, as this is often found in colloquial speech to refer to an ambiguous or unknown gender. For each test, the reader must assume that the gender-neutral pronoun ne is common knowledge and widely used in all ne examples, and that singular they is considered proper standard English as a gender-neutral pronoun for all singular they examples.
This examination should give us better understanding of which gender-neutral pronoun alternative may work best for the English language in the future. Pronouns are function words— meaning words that have little lexical meaning on their own and lend meaning via the grammatical relationships they have with other words around them in a sentence—and as such experience change either very slowly or not at all. This is, therefore, a useful exercise to
27 determine whether artificially inserting pronouns would be a worthwhile endeavor for the
English language. The full samples used for the following analysis can be found in Appendix B.
Specific Gender – Negative Context
As shown earlier, Yahoo’s Code of Ethics discusses how to handle certain situations that may or may not breach the company’s code. In one instance, a question is submitted about the request of a former female employee for copies of work she had produced while working at
Yahoo. In this example (Example 1), the woman not only likely violated the code of ethics but also nearly persuaded another coworker to do so as well. In fact, all of the questions and answers in the document either refer to women or do not explicitly state gender at all; women are the only ones emphasized for breaking the code of conduct, which could potentially lead readers to believe that Yahoo finds more fault in female employees than in male workers. A situation like this one would greatly benefit from a gender-neutral pronoun, as it could eliminate any possible readings of gender bias.
Replace with Ne Pronouns
With the gender-neutral pronoun ne, part of the section would read “A former member of my team called to ask me for some copies of materials we worked on together when ne was at
Yahoo. As we talked, I realized that ne still had some data we used on the project. I told nem I’d call nem back – now what?” In this case, there is no ambiguity about number of people involved
(it remains singular), and the person is not assigned an obvious gender. Nor are there are any contextual clues in the text to allude to the gender of the code violator because the gender is not
28 of any importance. The pronoun even fits in with the declension of standard English pronouns: ne resembles he and she, while nem resembles them. Its declension in the accusative form tends to follow the plural gender-neutral pronoun declension—this point is worth noting because it may be easier for a person used to colloquial speech to make the transition from accusative singular they (them) to accusative singular ne (nem), meaning adoption could be within the realm of possibility.
Replace with Singular They
When the same example is rewritten with singular they, the text maintains gender neutrality but risks losing its clarity due to the plural they being used as singular: “A former member of my team called to ask me for some copies of materials we worked on together when they were at Yahoo. As we talked, I realized that they still had some data we used on the project.
I told them I’d call them back – now what?” While singular they works well enough for colloquial speech, it poses a risk to business writing. Business documents rely on specificity, accuracy, and concision or risks confusing the reader. While the number of participants in this particular violation of the code of ethics may not be of great importance, any ambiguity in business texts equals risk for the business.
Specific Gender – Authority Figure
In this second example, Valve Corporation disparagingly discusses the issue of managers in the form of a definition entry. Despite the fact that management has a negative connotation at
Valve, it is still known as a source of power; it is actually this unequal distribution of power that
29 Valve stands against in the first place. Regardless of the company’s views on management, by automatically assigning a male gender to this position of power, Valve reinforces the idea of “the male norm”—the idea that it is normal for men to hold positions of power, while female authority figures are considered an irregularity and as such, female presence is emphasized.
Replace with Ne Pronouns
By replacing him with a gender-neutral pronoun, we can test the passage to see if the implicit message of male as norm continues to exist. “Manager—The kind of people we don’t have any of. So if you see one, tell somebody, because it’s probably the ghost of whoever was in this building before us. Whatever you do, don’t let nem give you a presentation on paradigms in spectral proactivity.” When replaced with gender-neutral nem, the issue of the male norm is eliminated—this replacement no longer signals that it is a given that all managers are male unless specified as a women manager or manageress. Nem allows the reader to assume the manager is a person of unspecified gender, which is important because gender is not actually of importance here. With this substitution, Valve can make a joke about management without it being mired down in the additional socio-political meaning implied by automatically assigning a male gender to the manager.
Valve could attempt to make the case that they used he as a gender-neutral pronoun; however, they do not do use he as a gender-neutral pronoun within the rest of their document, instead using the construction he or she to represent gender neutrality. Valve likely chose he simply because the cumbersome construction diminishes the humor of the passage. However, because of the English language’s history of automatically assigning authority roles a masculine
30 gender, it could be argued that this gendered pronoun perpetuates the idea of the male norm.
Even business documents cannot separate themselves from historical and cultural context, so writers must be attentive to details as seemingly insignificant as a function word in a joke. In this instance, nem offers Valve a certain level of freedom from gender bias and gives them a function word without the cultural baggage that a gendered pronoun carries.
Replace with Singular They
Singular they similarly solves the sample’s problem of assuming the male norm and does so without drawing too much attention to its usage. “Manager—The kind of people we don’t have any of. So if you see one, tell somebody, because it’s probably the ghost of whoever was in this building before us. Whatever you do, don’t let them give you a presentation on paradigms in spectral proactivity.” Under the assumption that singular they is considered an acceptable gender-neutral pronoun in standard English, the reader would likely see nothing wrong with this selection. Number is not of great importance in this sample, and the ambiguity between plural they and singular they would not pose a problem in understanding the text as it is not crucial to the message. Singular they also allows the gender of the manager to be ambiguous, thus eliminating any implicit reading of gender bias.
Ambiguous Gender Construction
In this final example, Yahoo uses a construction of his or her in order to maintain gender neutrality. This sample was taken from their Corporate Governance handbook, a manual that details how a company is controlled and directed. Because the information in this manual is
31 directed towards all employees, they left gender ambiguous in their directives by using a construction that includes both genders. Although visually cumbrous, this is an accepted way to skirt gender; unfortunately, in this sample from Yahoo, the surrounding sentence is necessarily bulky for precision. This leads the sentence to appear almost unmanageable in its use of parentheses, slashes, and grammatical conjunction “constructions” (i.e., and/or). The end result is an unwieldy passage that risks potentially confusing the reader.
Replace with Ne Pronouns
A great deal of the passage’s awkwardness is resolved when the construction is replaced with nir. Part of the original passage reads, “Shares held in a trust established by the director
(and/or his or her spouse) for estate or tax planning purposes count towards the guideline if the trust is revocable by the director (and/or his or her spouse) or for the benefit of his or her family members” (Yahoo, Corporate Governance 6). This single sentence uses the conjunction construction and/or twice, necessarily lengthening the passage for precision; however, the use of both the conjunction construction and the pronoun construction maintains precision at the risk of loss of clarity and ease of reading. By replacing the pronoun construction with nir, the writer makes the sentence much cleaner and succinct: “Shares held in a trust established by the director
(and/or nir spouse) for estate or tax planning purposes count towards the guideline if the trust is revocable by the director (and/or nir spouse) or for the benefit of nir family members.” Nir maintains gender ambiguity and avoids unnecessarily lengthening the sentence, allowing the reader to focus on understanding the content and conjunction construction without be being hindered by processing the pronoun construction as well. The use of a gender-neutral pronoun
32 also allows for gender ambiguity—this means that if the reader does not align his or herself to the gender binary of male or female, there is less risk of alienating, offending, or excluding the reader. A gender-neutral pronoun could protect companies by allowing them to be precise and inclusive when referring to people, which could help them avoid unintentionally excluding people on the basis of gender.
Replace with Singular They
Singular they similarly mitigates the problem of wordiness that the original sample presents; however, this concision comes at the price of precision. One of the most prominent problems with adopting singular they as an official solution to the language’s lack of a gender- neutral pronoun is its lack of clarity. They is used as a plural gender-neutral pronoun and if it were to be also used as a singular gender-neutral pronoun, the subject number would then be ambiguous. The reader would have to rely on context to determine subject number and, in cases where the subject number could be singular or plural, would result in lack of clarity and potentially confusion. In example 3, the passage would read, “Shares held in a trust established by the director (and/or their spouse) for estate or tax planning purposes count towards the guideline if the trust is revocable by the director (and/or their spouse) or for the benefit of their family members.” While singular they works in this instance, if the phrase their spouse was in a different sentence such as, “Their spouse works at the bank,” the subject number is ambiguous in that it could be about a polygamist family. Although this usage may be an unlikely scenario, it depicts the limits of singular they. Potential ambiguity, especially in a passage such as example
3 that places so much emphasis on precision, makes singular they a risk in business writing.
33
34 Chapter 7
Conclusions
Language is a choice, and as such, every word used by a writer carries with it implicit and explicit meaning. Out of the myriad “genres” of text that exist, business writing is among the few where every word is carefully vetted and weighed for the most precise meaning available to writer and reader. A company’s business documents represent, in essence, its voice. Thus, not only must business writing be self-aware in that it must be as transparent to the reader as possible, but it must also be hypersensitive to how it approaches audience, tone, and message. In today’s society, where the steady dissolution of a strict gender dichotomy is giving way to a broad spectrum of genders, companies must be aware of this phenomenon not only philosophically and socially, but linguistically, as well. As more people become open to gender and sexual fluidity, language must begin to evolve with their experiences and realities.
The English language’s lack of epicene pronouns has been a pronounced gap for centuries; however, within the past few decades, our society has progressed to the point of needing a truly gender-neutral singular pronoun, and it is due to this perceived gender
“expansion.” Despite the fact that function words such as pronouns rarely undergo evolution— and, when they do, at very slow, incremental rates—language is remarkable in its flexibility and ability to evolve to reflect our realities. If gender expansion becomes not only widespread, but widely accepted, our language will find a way to reflect this reality. The two most likely candidates to resolve this gap between reality and language is the adoption of singular they and the acceptance and universal usage of a neologism such as ne.
The solution most apt to become adopted is singular they. Singular they is more organic in that it is already often used colloquially as a singular gender neuter pronoun. While singular
35 they is adequate for many cases, the language loses some of its precision for number concord by blurring the lines between singular and plural they. This adoption does not necessarily avoid the issue of the gender spectrum, either; in an “us versus them” mentality, they could easily be reappropriated as a derogatory reference towards those who do not define themselves according to the gender dichotomy. Thus, the solution to the problem of a lack of an epicene pronoun could become a new problem. They could potentially take up dehumanizing connotations, eventually being relegated to the inanimate or unhuman such as it. Even if such a dismal fate does not befall singular they, it is unlikely that business writing will ever be able to formally adopt singular they because of its lack of precision. Ambiguity is tantamount to risk within business documentation and can lead readers to confusion, misunderstanding, or even legal loopholes, all of which can leave companies vulnerable. This means that even if singular they filled in the language’s lack of gender neutrality with regard to pronouns, companies will be faced with a decision to appear unenlightened, non-progressive, and backwards by not using a more equitable term or risk losing precision with its documentation. A third possibility is that companies find ways, besides contextual clues, to denote singular they as different from plural they, but this could likely lead to new constructions, footnotes, or symbols that make singular they as cumbersome as today’s pronoun constructions.
The best case scenario for the English language and for business writers is the adoption of a neologism that can actually represent an ambiguous or neuter gender. This will not detract from our language as it exists today because it will not create ambiguity by forcing words to take on new meanings that counter their current ones. If a singular gender-neutral pronoun can be artificially placed within another language based similarly on a gender system, then it is hard to see why English cannot also adopt its own singular gender-neutral pronoun. This kind of
36 neologism can be used by business writers and will resolve issues with unwieldy pronoun constructions; implicit, yet unintentional meaning created by the use of one gender over another; and any disconnection between a company and those whose definition of gender is more fluid than a strict dichotomy. Expanding language is preferable to limiting it.
Regardless of what solution is chosen to solve the lack of an epicene pronoun in English, the language has arrived at a crossroads where it must either evolve to reflect our reality or face becoming ineffectual. If our language does not evolve to adequately represent our world, we risk losing more meaning than we create, eventually driving us apart in our ability to understand and connect with each other.
37 Chapter 8
Future Research
This work only begins to illuminate and build upon the awareness that our language not only faces a gap in its ability to represent reality, but that this gap is growing as our reality changes. The lack of an epicene pronoun began as an issue of ambiguity and morphed into a problem for feminists and has been evolving into a problem for the LGBTQ community for quite a while. Further research should continue tracking popular usage of Sweden’s own artificial singular gender-neutral pronoun to see if it endures. Business documentation for other industries and sectors should likewise be analyzed in terms of usage of gender pronouns and gender- specific words. External business documents as well as in-house texts could be evaluated against each other for potential discrepancies in tone and approach to gender clusivity.
Another potential avenue for research would be to delve deeper into the technology sector, particularly with video games. Valve Corporation’s own documentation is worthy of further analysis, particularly in a time when women’s presence in the industry is viewed by some as a threat, and the feminist critique of the sector is met with vitriol and threats. The contradiction between the perceived progressiveness of the technology sector versus its antiquated, inhospitable reception of gender critique would likely uncover interesting insights into this sector, as well.
In-depth case studies of artificial singular gender-neutral pronoun adoption, such as Twin
Oak’s co and University of California at Berkeley’s use of ze, could provide insight into how such neologisms could be inserted into our language. Existing neologisms such as Ne, Ve,
Spivak, Ze, and Xe could also be tested upon diverse groups to evaluate how well they are able to learn and adopt certain neologisms.
38
Appendix A
Corpus Frequency Charts
39
Company Documents Word Count Google Code of Ethics 6,309 Facebook Code of Ethics 3,092 Yahoo Code of Ethics 8,909 Yahoo Governance 4,126 IBM Governance 1,840 IBM Policies 3,356 Twitter Governance 2,760 Twitter Code of Business Conduct 2,635 Valve Employee Handbook 11,620 Total Word Count: 44,647
Companies Word Count Percentage of Total Google 6,309 14% Facebook 3,092 7% Yahoo 13,035 29% IBM 5,196 12% Twitter 5,395 12% Valve 11,620 26% Total Word Count: 44,647 100%
40 Appendix B
Text Samples from Chapter 6
These samples are divided by example and subdivided by pronoun usage. The pronouns being analyzed are italicized so the reader can see exactly which pronouns are being examined.
Example 1: Yahoo’s Code of Ethics
Original
Q: A former member of my team called to ask me for some copies of materials
we worked on together when she was at Yahoo. As we talked, I realized that she
still had some data we used on the project. I told her I’d call her back – now
what?
A: First, don’t provide copies of the materials she requested. You may be in
violation of the Code by doing so. She may have violated the Code by taking
Yahoo confidential and/or proprietary information, and there could be other issues
if she shared this information with others. Contact your manager, the ECO, or the
Legal Department for guidance. (20)
41 Ne
Q: A former member of my team called to ask me for some copies of materials we
worked on together when ne was at Yahoo. As we talked, I realized that ne still had some
data we used on the project. I told nem I’d call nem back – now what?
A: First, don’t provide copies of the materials ne requested. You may be in violation of
the Code by doing so. Ne may have violated the Code by taking Yahoo confidential
and/or proprietary information, and there could be other issues if ne shared this
information with others. Contact your manager, the ECO, or the Legal Department for
guidance. (20)
Singular They
Q: A former member of my team called to ask me for some copies of materials
we worked on together when they were at Yahoo. As we talked, I realized that
they still had some data we used on the project. I told them I’d call them back –
now what?
A: First, don’t provide copies of the materials they requested. You may be in
violation of the Code by doing so. They may have violated the Code by taking
Yahoo confidential and/or proprietary information, and there could be other issues
if they shared this information with others. Contact your manager, the ECO, or the
Legal Department for guidance. (20)
42 Example 2: Valve Corporation’s Employee Handbook
Original
Manager—The kind of people we don’t have any of. So if you see one, tell
somebody, because it’s probably the ghost of whoever was in this building before
us. Whatever you do, don’t let him give you a presentation on paradigms in
spectral proactivity. (56)
Ne
Manager—The kind of people we don’t have any of. So if you see one, tell
somebody, because it’s probably the ghost of whoever was in this building before
us. Whatever you do, don’t let nem give you a presentation on paradigms in
spectral proactivity. (56)
Singular They
Manager—The kind of people we don’t have any of. So if you see one, tell
somebody, because it’s probably the ghost of whoever was in this building before
us. Whatever you do, don’t let them give you a presentation on paradigms in
spectral proactivity. (56)
43 Example 3: Yahoo’s Corporate Governance
Original
Vested but unpaid or deferred shares will count toward satisfaction of the
threshold; however, vested but unexercised options do not. Shares held in a trust
established by the director (and/or his or her spouse) for estate or tax planning
purposes count towards the guideline if the trust is revocable by the director
(and/or his or her spouse) or for the benefit of his or her family members. (6)
Ne
Vested but unpaid or deferred shares will count toward satisfaction of the
threshold; however, vested but unexercised options do not. Shares held in a trust
established by the director (and/or nir spouse) for estate or tax planning purposes
count towards the guideline if the trust is revocable by the director (and/or nir
spouse) or for the benefit of nir family members. (6)
Singular They
Vested but unpaid or deferred shares will count toward satisfaction of the
threshold; however, vested but unexercised options do not. Shares held in a trust
44 established by the director (and/or their spouse) for estate or tax planning purposes count towards the guideline if the trust is revocable by the director
(and/or their spouse) or for the benefit of their family members. (6)
45
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ACADEMIC VITA
Kristina Peszel 814-882-0490/630 Nagle Rd., Erie, PA 16511/[email protected] ______
EDUCATION English – Professional Writing Expected Graduation: Dec. 2014 Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Minor in Management Information Systems
WORK EXPERIENCE
Enterprise Architecture Intern May 2014 – Present Erie Insurance, Erie, PA Develop architecture patterns Author high level analyses and conceptual solution documents for various IT projects Facilitate communication between Enterprise Architecture department and IT
Teacher’s Assistant - MIS 430 – Systems Analysis September 2013 – May 2014 Black School of Business, Penn State Behrend Grade student papers for grammar, clarity, and accuracy of content in MIS 430 - Systems Analysis Offer constructive criticism on how to improve project content
Teacher’s Assistant - Summer Adult Learner English, June 2013-August 2013 School of H & SS, Penn State Behrend Presented on various grammar and writing topics to adult learners Answered various questions on grammar, content, and layout for writing papers Prepared learning materials for adult learners
Lead Writing Tutor, Learning Resource Center, Penn State August 2011 - Present Check student papers for grammar, spelling, and syntax errors Help students research paper topics Advise on organization of papers Oversee composition support program Schedule meetings between faculty and tutors Resolve any problems and concerns between tutors and faculty
HONORS AND AWARDS
Outstanding English Major in Professional Writing Spring 2014 Eric A. and Josephine S. Walker Award Spring 2014 Schreyer’s Honors Program Fall 2011 – Present Dean’s List Fall 2010 – Present
Evan Pugh Scholar Award 2012- 2013 Academic Year President’s Freshman Award 2010-2011 Academic Year Behrend Honors Program Fall 2010 – Spring 2012
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
Vice President, Omicron Delta Kappa May 2013-May 2014 Plan Three Miles for Smiles 5K charity Assist President with Oversee committees
Secretary, Omicron Delta Kappa May 2012-May 2013 Record minutes for Executive Board and general meetings Assemble agendas for biweekly meetings Track meeting attendance
Vice President, Alpha Sigma Tau November 2012-May 2014 Track sisters’ academic progress Create academic plans for sisters with GPAs under 2.5 Assist President with planning events
PR Committee, Panhellenic Council January 2011 – May 2011 Create posters, flyers, and other types of handouts to publicize upcoming Greek events Mail, e-mail, and post print media around campus
Editor, Alpha Sigma Tau November 2011 – November 2013 Proofread any article, letter, or publicity that goes out to the public Write bi-yearly articles for national magazine, The Anchor
Secretary, Alpha Sigma Tau November 2011 – November 2012 Assemble and organize agendas for weekly meetings Record minutes for Executive Board and general meetings Document attendance and file excuses
PR Committee, Lion Entertainment Board September 2011 – January 2013 Create posters and table tents to advertise upcoming Late Night events Disseminate posters and table tents around campus
Contributing Writer, The Beacon September 2011 – May 2012 Create and edit stories for multiple sections including News, Arts and Humanities, and Opinion Interview students and staff for articles Work under short deadlines