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For over a hundred years, a tenth-century Viking skeleton known as the ‘Birka warrior’ had – despite possessing an apparently female pelvis – been assumed to be male because it was buried alongside a full set of weapons and two sacrificed horses.11 These grave contents indicated that the occupant had been a warrior12 – and warrior meant male (archaeologists put the numerous references to female fighters in Viking lore down to ‘mythical embellishments’13). But although weapons apparently trump the pelvis when it comes to sex, they don’t trump DNA and in 2017 testing confirmed that these bones did indeed belong to a woman.
Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics. The stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future. They are all marked – disfigured – by a female-shaped ‘absent presence’. This is the gender data gap.
The female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning that we ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for it.
Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence.
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
A group of one hundred female teachers in Spanish would be referred to as ‘las profesoras’ – but as soon as you add a single male teacher, the group suddenly becomes ‘los profesores’. Such is the power of the default male.
‘Battle-scarred skeletons of multiple women have been found across the Eurasian steppes from Bulgaria to Mongolia’ wrote Natalie Haynes in the Guardian. For people such as the ancient Scythians, who fought on horseback with bows and arrows, there was no innate male warrior advantage, and DNA testing of skeletons buried with weapons in more than 1,000 Scythian burial mounds from Ukraine to Central Asia have revealed that up to 37% of Scythian women and girls were active warriors.
In 2012, a World Economic Forum analysis found that countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender. But here’s an interesting quirk: countries with genderless languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) are not the most equal. Instead, that honour belongs to a third group, countries with ‘natural gender languages’ such as English. These languages allow gender to be marked (female teacher, male nurse) but largely don’t encode it into the words themselves. The study authors suggested that if you can’t mark gender in any way you can’t ‘correct’ the hidden bias in a language by emphasising ‘women’s presence in the world’. In short: because men go without saying, it matters when women literally can’t get said at all.