| Human discourse does not consist of people stating neutral, truthful propositions in isolation. We are not Vulcans. When someone chooses to say a particular sentence is as much a part of communication as what that sentence says. So when someone says "very few women are capable of running a Fortune 500 company effectively," they aren't merely blurting out a fact at random, they are trying to say something. And depending on the context, and who they are, and who they are speaking to, the thing they are trying to say can be different. In many cases, if someone brings up that particular fact in conversation, you would reasonably conclude that they are submitting it in support of the idea that it is unsurprising that few women are CEOs of F500 companies; that they believe that is natural and reasonable. But in other circumstances, say in a profile of a successful female F500 CEO, that same assertion could be being offered in support of the thesis that the subject of the profile is an exceptional individual, deserving of success. Or, as in muglug's comment to which you're replying, it could be being used to illustrate a point about the fact that very few people are capable of running a fortune 500. So this is the thing: a fact is neutral. But the facts that you introduce into a conversation are always selected to support a position. And a position can certainly be sexist. |
Yay.
But also ... there's a sort of idiot's veto over language. If people who are racist say "X", and I also say "X", does that make me racist? Well, no. But as a participant in a society, as a participant in a conversation, I need to be aware of the context. If racist people are saying "X", I should probably take advantage of the insane level of linguistic flexibility in most human languages and find a different way to make the point I was trying to make.
Some will protest that this "capitulation" ("I refuse to stop saying X just some bad people are saying it too") allows the bad people to control our language. I say that if you're not a bad person (whatever that might mean), you can almost certainly find alternative ways of speaking that avoid us wasting time debating whether you're a bad person.