The old saying has it that “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This is, of course, censorious nonsense meant to socialize children to be dully agreeable and incapable of expressing their critical thoughts. But at least it doesn’t ask people to edit any of their expressions, merely to not express themselves at all. The same can’t be said for Catalyst, a company that offers a sort of political autocorrect service in order to help end “biases that are stopping women from achieving equality at work.”
A lofty and noble goal. How does Catalyst advance it? The main product is the #BiasCorrect software extension in the already socially nightmarish workplace chat program Slack. The program highlights sentences like “Could she be more emotional?” and pops up with a replacement, as though it were a grammar error in Microsoft Word, suggesting some phrasing that isn’t a sexist trope, in this case that she is merely “passionate.” (I cannot imagine saying either of these two things about a coworker, but OK.)
Some others: “She’s so aggressive” becomes “She’s so persuasive” and “She’s so cold” becomes “She’s so focused.” The point, anyway, is to make it impossible to use phrasings that connote nasty stereotypes about women using a sort of monitoring software. The language police got a Robocop.
Now, I happen to hate the stereotype about women being more emotional, not because I am so woke, but because if we’re going to stereotype, I just happen to have observed men being the much more hysterical and emotionally driven gender. In H.L. Mencken’s dictionary of quotations, collected and organized by subject matter over a long literary life, the section on women is the longest and the most boring, because it is just a list of men through the centuries quipping repetitively that women’s minds are like children’s or animals’. So, like Catalyst, I wish these tropes would go away as cultural ideas. Still, what precisely is the theory for achieving that being presented here?
It is that somehow what is holding women back is in our language, not our thoughts, attitudes, and decisions. So if we want to change society and norms, we censor language and change what is OK and not OK to say. Never mind that the women in an office using this software would never know whether the men were being genuine or just being robo-edited. Never mind that “passionate” would just become the new, sexist code word for emotional. Catalyst is cashing in on an increasingly common assumption, which is the same assumption built into the whole language policing instinct that continues to pervade our culture: If you don’t have anything nice to connote, don’t connote anything at all.
