SEX Lex Survey Query

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:00 AM -0600 1/2/02, carljweber wrote:
>SEX Lex Survey Query
>
>Carl Jeffrey Weber
>
>Dear Linguists and Philologists,
>
>Please help identify the phenomenon behind the statistics. "Media bias" has
>recently been discussed in the news. I devised a simple method to generate
>data, perhaps relevant to personal pronoun etymology, demographic trends,
>cultural change, etc. What do the following data support, prove, and/or
>disprove? Are you surprised -- would you have predicted the data?

They prove that something's weird about your search engines.  Google shows
e.g
spokesman, 2,040,000
spokeswoman, 540,000

chairman, 7,520,000
chairwoman, 137,000

fireman, 304,000
firewoman, 2,040

alderman, 234,000
alderwoman, 3,300

all of which is basically what I'd have predicted.  maybe your search
engines are pre-edited for sexism?  I prefer unedited search engines
myself.

larry

>
>/////////////////////
>
>My search engine, MSN, shows the following inputs/hits:
>
>spokesman, 41 ; spokeswoman 374,090
>
>chairman, 362 ; chairwoman, 80,878
>
>fireman, 25 ; firewoman 1443
>
>postman, 50 ; postwoman, 405
>
>alderman, 19 ; alderwoman, 1121
>
>///////////////////
>
>Yahoo search:     spokesman,  21 ; spokeswoman, 341,000, etc.
>
>///////////////////
>