Spot on Shruthi - excellent article. Eloquent and informative, bookmarking this for future referral.

My tuppence on this is based on Caroline Criado-Perez's excellent "Invisbile Women". French, Spanish and German are a few examples of gender-inflected languages. Guess what the “default” gender is? Yup. Male. The German word for “lawyer” is Anwalt. But the literal translation is male lawyer, not a lawyer. Countries with gender-inflected languages are the most gender-unequal. English isn’t gendered i.e. there is no word for “female banker” or “male nanny” but what gender pops up in your head for astronaut or athlete or professor? That’s the male default. That’s the gender data gap.

The world’s fastest-growing langue is Emoji (:D). Do you know what the emoji of a running man was called? Runner. Not “running man”. A male police official? Police officer. Not policeman. Male default, female exception. This was since corrected by Unicode in 2016.

Would appreciate if you could tell me your thoughts on my article!