Whoever runs the official feed of the England Football Team pretty quickly decided it wasn’t the best idea to welcome the women’s national team back to the motherland this week with this little tweet:
The reaction was perhaps best summarized by this bit of Internet sarcasm:
The tweet has since been deleted, and the article which it paraphrased has been altered to cut out out the “mothers, partners, sisters and daughters” business.
Where it originally read ...
England Women went back to being mothers, partners, sisters and daughters on Monday morning, but over the past month they have taken on another title -- heroes.
It has since been revised to read:
England Women returned home as heroes on Monday morning - with their bronze medals proudly hanging round their necks.
The author of the article, FA Content Editor James Callow, apologized on Twitter to all who were offended by the phrasing, but implied he would have used similar phrasing if the athletes were men.
The episode harkens back to a similar revision by The New York Times to famed scientist Yvonne Brill’s obituary back in 2013 after similar cries of sexism.
The original opening of that piece read as such:
She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.
But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.
If you can see what was troubling about the England tweet, you can probably catch what angered people about the obituary's opening. Notably, the Times’ obituaries editor, William McDonald, told the newspaper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, that he was similarly “surprised” by the negative response to the opening. “It never occurred to us that this would be read as sexist,” he said at the time.
Sullivan’s closing thoughts on the stroganoff miscue might well be applied to Callow’s piece today, as well:
[I]f Yvonne Brill’s life was worth writing about because of her achievements, and all agree that it was, then the glories of her beef stroganoff should have been little more than a footnote.
The emphasis on her domesticity — and, more important, the obituary’s overall framing as a story about gender — had the effect of undervaluing what really landed Mrs. Brill on the Times obituaries page: her groundbreaking scientific work.
Perhaps Callow's mistake was simply one of phrasing. Or perhaps the mistake was not malicious but rather subconscious -- a result of a patriarchy that leads many of us to think of women (yes, still today) first and foremost in terms of domesticity. Either way, it’s a mistake worth learning from. We should all be able to agree on that.