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There’s an old riddle: The cops raid a house looking for a murderer named Robert. They break in and find a firefighter, a mechanic, and a mailman all sitting around playing poker and immediately arrest the mailman. How did they know the mailman was the killer? Aside from the fact that it was a mailman (so duh), it was because the firefighter and mechanic were women, but your sexist brain automatically concluded all three were men.
This riddle exemplifies our tendency to associate certain roles as male roles, which has been the topic of debate in the latest Wikipedia sexism scandal. When the American novelist Amanda Filipacchi noticed that she’d been moved from the “American novelists” category to the “American women novelists” category, along with all of the other female American novelists, she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling out the sexist categorization.
“It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world," she wrote.
Meanwhile, John Pack Lambert, the 32-year-old Wayne State University student responsible for systematically funneling female novelists into a gendered subcategory from his home in the Detroit suburbs, claims he wasn’t motivated by sexism — only his obsessive, ever-present impulse to diffuse major categories into subcategories on Wikipedia.
As he told James Gleick of the New York Review of Books Blog, “This whole hullabaloo is really missing the point. The people who are making a big deal about this are not being up-front about what happens if we do not diffuse categories.”