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The other day I had occasion to use the pronoun “they” in the new way, referring to a specific person. Not your grandfather’s singular “they” with its generic meaning — “A student can hand their paper in early if they want to” — but “they” as in, “Roberta wants a haircut, and they also want some highlights.”

I wangled it, but it required a bit of conscious effort. Pronouns sit deep in our cognition, used constantly and bound by habit. “It’s their turn to use the kite, don’t you think?” I said, thinking consciously about my sentence in a way that I don’t have to usually.

I know some find it wearying. Why does language have to change all the time, with all we have to think about? But we are not unique: There are times when the language firmament shifts under people’s feet, and they get through it. In the 1700s, English speakers had to get used to a new idea that double and triple negatives were “wrong.” Shakespeare could write, “There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof” for Falstaff in “Henry IV, Part II,” but now we had to deal with the idea that two negatives signify a positive, despite no one being taught this aboutFrench and countless other languages.

In standard English, “thou” as the singular second-person pronoun fell away, and one used “you” in both singular and plural. For a while, people used singular verb forms with “you.” John and Abigail Adams did it all the time. “I wish you was nearer to us,” wrote Abigail — these days embodied in our minds as, say, Laura Linney’s prim portrayal — in 1775. But grammarians didn’t like it, so people had to shape up and start saying, even to one person, “you were.”

What seems to gall some people about the new singular “they” is that people are requesting to be addressed in a novel way that feels counterintuitive to many. But then just some decades ago, some will remember how disorienting it could be to adapt to using “Ms.” rather than delineating women as married or unmarried on the basis of “Mrs.” and “Miss.” Now that custom can look somewhere between coarse and hilarious. (Think of the “Schitt’s Creek” scene when Roland deceptively introduces Stevie as “Miss Felmington.”)

I remember how it felt to be an English speaker in the late 1980s when seemingly overnight, one was to say “Asian” rather than “Oriental,” “Latino” rather than “Hispanic,” and shortly thereafter, “African American” rather than “Black,” with “Oriental,” especially, considered from then on offensive (while “Black” has made a return as an adjective). And yet the earth kept spinning, and references to “Orientals” are now as antique as Atari and McDonald’s hamburgers in Styrofoam boxes.

Because pronouns are used so much, it’s easy to think that the way they are at a given time is the way pronouns are supposed to be. But there is a language in New Guinea called Berik in which there is one pronoun for second person and one pronoun that means “he,” “she,” “it” and “they”; only in the first person is there a difference between “I” and “we.” Berik speakers manage quite well. I know someone given to a quirk of referring to himself archly as “we.” In doing so and also referring to people with the new singular “they,” he is using an English in which you don’t differentiate singular from plural in any pronouns at all. Yet he manages just fine.

Language change is a spectator sport. It isn’t whether but how things will change over time, and getting to witness a major change like what’s happening to “they” is a kind of privilege, a top ticket.

Just as people said “you was” in the singular for a while, there will probably be some flutter in terms of how we deal with singular “they” and verb agreement. Already we are taught that the “proper” use of singular “they” is with plural agreement — “they are ready for their highlights now

However, there will be a natural temptation to use the third-person singular form with “s” with singular “they”: “They wants to see you now.” My guess is that this will be especially common in Black English, where using “s” with “they” is already an aspect of its grammar and thus will feel correct. Just possibly, this will influence standard usage, given the impact that Black English often has on general American English these days.

Another guess is that there may be a call to differentiate singular “they” in writing by capitalizing it. Maybe that will catch on. Maybe not. But discussion will be as lively as the one in Sweden over the gender-neutral pronoun “hen,” which has dug in for real.

You just never know how things are going to morph. Way back in Old English, the word for “she” was “heo,” and over time that started to sound so much like “he” that in some dialects you just said “he” for men and women. Were things going to stay that way, given that a great many languages have gender-neutral pronouns of that kind? One may have wondered. But instead, English developed a new pronoun. Possibly it was by yanking a new feminine pronoun from a word that meant “that,” used with nouns of feminine gender. Or possibly it was something mysterious that happened in northern England and Scotland; theories are various, but the result was a new pronoun, “she.” And most likely, some people at first didn’t like it.

They died, and here we are. As the school year starts, I’m seeing yet more interesting things. A linguistics professor I know tells me that when she presented “The boy wants to see a picture of herself” as a mistaken sentence — a classic kind of blackboard example in linguistics since the 1960s — a couple of students said that these days, that sentence can actually be used by some people. I’m already listening around for examples.

They tell you mountains become sand, but you never get to see it happening. Language change happens faster, and you actually get to witness it. It’s something to treasure.

IN PRAISE OF NEW PRONOUNS

by John McWhorter

SO YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH "ZUCK TALK", RIGHT?

by John Herrman

So, in spoken language, there are these things that just sort of show up over time, and then it seems like they’re everywhere, and so we call them trends, right? So in a world where there is more recorded speech than ever, and, um, more access to all of this speech, these changes can happen very fast, but they can also be harder to isolate, right? So there’s actually a whole field about this, and it’s actually called linguistics, and it’s a really good tool for understanding the world around us.

Right?

Maybe you know someone who talks like this. It’s a disorienting speaking style, one that marries supreme confidence with nervous filler words and a fear of pauses. Maybe you overhear this voice talking to a date about meme stocks.

Maybe you hear it pitching a counterintuitive regulatory proposal on TV, or on a podcast, explaining which complicated things are actually simple and which simple things are actually complicated. Maybe it’s an executive on an earnings call, in an interview or pacing around a stage, delivering a Jobsian message in a Gatesian tone.

Maybe you hear Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook. The style didn’t originate with him, nor is he responsible for its spread. He may, however, be its most visible and successful practitioner.

During his frequent public appearances, Mr. Zuckerberg can be heard expounding on all sorts of topics in this manner: the future of tech (“in terms of augmented reality, right, so there is virtual reality. …”); the early days of his social network (“there was no feed, right?”); human progress (“right, so, I mean life expectancy has gone up from about 50 to about 75”); Facebook’s mission (“you know, what I care about is giving people the power to share, giving every person a voice so we can make the world more open and connected. Right?”); “the history of science” (“most big scientific breakthroughs are driven by new tools, right, new ways of seeing things, right?”).

This is the voice of someone — in this case, and often, a man — who is as comfortable speaking about virtually any subject as he is uncomfortable speaking at all. (This is not the careful, measured voice of Sheryl Sandberg, the cheerily blustering awkwardness of Elon Musk.) It is, by default, one of the defining communication styles of its time. Right?

So.

ZuckTalk is a style of unpolished speech exhibited in contexts where polish is customary. It’s a linguistic hooded sweatshirt in a metaphorical boardroom. It is more than a collection of tics, but its tics are crucial to understanding it.

One: So. Another: Right? In their Zuckerbergian ultimate form, combined as a programmatic if-then connective move: Right? So.

Linguistic observers have noted for years the apparent rise of “so” in connection with the popularization of certain subjects and modes of speech. In 2010, in The New York Times, Anand Giridharadas announced the arrival of a new species of the unassuming word.

“‘So’ may be the new ‘well,’ ‘um,’ ‘oh’ and ‘like.’ No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning,” he wrote, crediting the journalist Michael Lewis with documenting its use among programmers at Microsoft more than a decade earlier.

In 2015, in a story for “Fresh Air” on NPR, Geoff Nunberg, the program’s longtime linguist, explained this use of “so” as a cue used by “people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the back story,” he said. Hence his name for it: back story “so.”

Syelle Graves, a linguist and the assistant director of the Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote her dissertation on the rise and uses of this particular “so.” Analyzing a sampling of spontaneous, unwritten American speech from 1990 to 2011, she concluded that this usage of “so” had indeed increased significantly, often as a stand-in for “well.”

By examining online posts, she also found that people were not only noticing its spread — they were also often irritated by it. “One of the most surprising results was that some public posters associated back story ‘so’ with women, but just as many associated it with men,” Dr. Graves wrote in an email.

Later, Dr. Graves conducted a survey in which subjects responded to recordings of men and women providing identical answers to questions, with “so” and “well” spliced in at the beginning. “In a nutshell, the woman who answered with back story ‘so’ was rated as less authoritative, more trendy and more like a ‘valley girl’ than the exact same woman who answered questions with well,” she said.

“The man who answered questions with back story ‘so’ was less likable, more condescending and more like a ‘tech bro’ than the exact same recording of the exact same man who answered with ‘well,’” she said.

Speakers loosely associated with either of California’s apparently linguistically verdant valleys — Silicon in the north, San Fernando in the south — were generally “perceived as less intelligent, less professionally competent and less mature, among other things.”

Right?

Well into the era of “so,” another linguistic trend was receiving much more attention: vocal fry.

The term describes a manner of speaking — also known as “creaky voice” — that carries with it a number of gendered connotations. Studies have suggested that women with vocal fry are often judged as less competent, less intelligent and less qualified than those without.

In popular culture, vocal fry became a joke, then its defense a minor cause; in countless YouTube comment sections, it was a way for sexist people to briefly masquerade as concerned prescriptive linguists in order to complain, once again, about how women talk.

Male-coded speaking styles are subject to somewhat less scrutiny. That’s not to say they go completely unnoticed. Users on Quora, a sort of professional class Yahoo! Answers, which is popular among employees in tech and tech-adjacent industries and skews male, have returned again and again to the same question: “When and why did everyone start ending sentences with ‘right?’”

This is what’s called a question-tag “right,” similar to a British “innit,” a Canadian “eh” or a French “n’est-ce pas.” (See also: “Correct?” “Is it not?” “No?” “OK?”)

To hear Quora users tell it, “right” is endemic in their worlds. “I suspect that this speaking technique may have possibly developed as a result of the proliferation of podcasts, TED Talks and NPR-type radio programs,” one user wrote. “Because they are not interested in what you have to say, they only want you to affirm/confirm what they are saying.”

“It could be linked to narcissism or a borderline personality disorder,” another user wrote. “Seems to be very common among the Silicon Valley intelligentsia,” a third said.

Micah Siegel, a venture capitalist and former Stanford professor, joined one Quora thread with an unusually specific theory. “My take is that this is a classic speech virus,” he wrote. “I believe it started in the particle physics community in the early 1980s, spread to the solid state physics community in the mid 1980s and then to the neuroscience community in the late 1980s. It appears to have gone mainstream just in the past few years. I am not sure what caused this latest jump.”

Mr. Siegel isn’t alone in observing the prevalence of “right?” among academics in the sciences; a 2004 paper by the linguist Erik Schleef found far higher usage of related forms of “OK” and “right” in natural science lectures than in humanities lectures, speculating that they need to “check on understanding more often than humanities instructors.”

One plausible answer to Mr. Siegel’s question about what caused “right” to enter “mainstream” speech is that people from academic backgrounds like his — familiar with a culture of talks and presentations, most comfortable in settings with specialized shared expertise — are now public figures. They work on companies and products that, rather quickly, became extremely powerful well outside of the worlds in which they were built.

However credible one finds the linguistic lab-leak theory, “right” and its many variants achieved wide community spread. In 2018, writing for The Cut, Katy Schneider diagnosed Mark Cuban with severe rightness.

“He disguises the ‘right’ as a question, but really it’s the opposite: a flat, affectless confirmation of whatever he himself just said, a brief affirmative pause between one confident statement and the next,” she wrote. Soon, she heard it everywhere, “used frequently by pundits, podcast hosts, TED Talk speakers.”

Mignon Fogarty, the host of the “Grammar Girl” podcast and the author of seven books about language, cautions that, when it comes to changes in language, annoyance and recognition are often intertwined. “When you don’t like someone, it’s easy to criticize their speech as a way of manifesting that,” she said. As someone who records a weekly audio program on language, she knows that firsthand.

In 2014, after receiving complaints about how often she began sentences with “so,” Ms. Fogarty suggested a story idea to one of her contributors: Is this habit condescending? The writer was Dr. Graves, and the answer, it turned out, was complicated.

For a young, rising Facebook founder to talk in a way that whizzes through premises on the way to a pitch was, among other things, part of the job. Mr. Zuckerberg’s former speechwriter Kate Losse described his manner of speaking in her memoir, “Boy Kings,” as “a combination of efficient shorthand and imperialist confidence.” Also: “flat” but with a “boyish cadence.”

The job, however, has changed. Which may be why, as a style of speaking, ZuckTalk is starting to sound … a little old? Or maybe just ubiquitous.

Even Mr. Zuckerberg seems to have noticed. According to transcripts from Marquette University’s Zuckerberg Files project, the distilled “right? so” construction is, after a peak in 2016 — much to talk about! plenty to explain! — falling out of favor in the Facebook creator’s lexicon.

In the world he helped create, however, “right” and “so” are right at home. They’re tools for the explainers among us and have proliferated as such: in media interviews, seminars, talks and speeches. Now, thanks to social media — the ever-prompting machine — everyone has the chance, or need, to explain themselves in front of an audience.

“So” is comfortable in front of the YouTube video; “right” handily punctuates up the Instagram Live; a “right? so” maneuver erases dead air on a podcast. These turns of phrase aren’t likely to go away soon, so we might as well get used to them. Right?

When the computer scientist and mathematician Lenore Blum announced her resignation from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018, the community was jolted. A distinguished professor, she’d helped found the Association for Women in Mathematics, and made seminal contributions to the field. But she said she found herself steadily marginalized from a center she’d help create — blocked from important decisions, dismissed and ignored. She explained at the time: “Subtle biases and microaggressions pile up, few of which on their own rise to the level of ‘let’s take action,’ but are insidious nonetheless.”

It’s an experience many women can relate to. But how much does everyday sexism at work matter? Most would agree that outright discrimination when it comes to hiring and advancement is a bad thing, but what about the small indignities that women experience day after day? The expectation that they be unfailingly helpful; the golf rounds and networking opportunities they’re not invited to; the siphoning off of credit for their work by others; unfair performance reviews that penalize them for the same behavior that’s applauded in men; the “manterrupting”?

When I was researching my book “The End of Bias: A Beginning” I wanted to understand the collective impact of these less visible forms of bias, but data were hard to come by. Bias doesn’t happen once or twice; it happens day after day, week after week. To explore the aggregate impact of routine gender bias over time, I teamed up with Kenny Joseph, a computer science professor at the University at Buffalo, and a graduate student there, Yuhao Du, to create a computer simulation of a workplace. We call our simulated workplace “NormCorp.” Here’s how it works.

NormCorp is a simple company. Employees do projects, either alone or in pairs. These succeed or fail, which affects a score we call “promotability.” Twice a year, employees go through performance reviews, and the top scorers at each level are promoted to the next level.

NormCorp employees are affected by the kinds of gender bias that are endemic in the workplace. Women’s successful solo projects are valued slightly less than men’s, and their successful joint projects with men accrue them less credit. They are also penalized slightly more when they fail. Occasional “stretch” projects have outsize rewards, but as in the real world, women’s potential is underrecognized compared with men’s, so they must have a greater record of past successes to be assigned these projects. A fraction of women point out the unfairness and are then penalized for the perception that they are “self-promoting.” And as the proportion of women decreases, those that are left face more stereotyping.

We simulated 10 years of promotion cycles happening at NormCorp based on these rules, and here is how women’s representation changed over time.

These biases have all been demonstrated across various professional fields. One working paper study of over 500,000 physician referrals showed that women surgeons receive fewer referrals after successful outcomes than male surgeons. Women economists are less likely to receive tenure the more they co-author papers with men. An analysis at a large company found that women’s, as well as minority men’s, performance was effectively “discounted” compared with that of white men.

And women are penalized for straying from “feminine” personality traits. An analysis of real-world workplace performance evaluations found that more than three-quarters of women’s critical evaluations contained negative comments about their personalities, compared with 2 percent of men’s. If a woman whose contributions are overlooked speaks up, she may be labeled a self-promoter, and consequently face further obstacles to success. She may also become less motivated and committed to the organization. The American Bar Association found that 70 percent of women lawyers of color considered leaving or had left the legal profession entirely, citing being undervalued at work and facing barriers to advancement.

Our model does not take into account women, such as Lenore Blum, who quit their jobs after experiencing an unmanageable amount of bias. But it visualizes how these penalties add up over time for women who stay, so that by the time you reach more senior levels of management, there are fewer women left to promote. These factors not only prevent women from reaching the top ranks in their company but for those who do, it also makes the career path longer and more demanding.

When we dig into the trajectory of individual people in our simulation, stories begin to emerge. With just 3 percent bias, one employee — let’s call her Jenelle — starts in an entry-level position, and makes it to the executive level, but it takes her 17 performance review cycles (eight and a half years) to get there, and she needs 208 successful projects to make it. “William” starts at the same level but he gets to executive level much faster — after only eight performance reviews and half Jenelle’s successes at the time she becomes an executive.

Our model shows how large organizational disparities can emerge from many small, even unintentional biases happening frequently over a long period of time. Laws are often designed to address large events that happen infrequently and can be easily attributed to a single actor—for example, overt sexual harassment by a manager — or “pattern and practice” problems, such as discriminatory policies. But women’s progress is hindered even without one egregious incident, or an official policy that is discriminatory.

Gender bias takes on different dimensions depending on other intersecting aspects of a person’s identity, such as race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and more. Another American Bar Association study found that white women and men of color face similar hurdles to being seen as competent, but women of color face more than either group.

Backlash, too, plays out differently for women of different racial groups, points out Erika Hall, an Emory University management professor. A survey of hundreds of women scientists she helped conduct found that Asian American women reported the highest amount of backlash for self-promotion and assertive behavior. An experimental study by the social psychologist Robert Livingston and colleagues, meanwhile, found that white women are more penalized for demonstrating dominant behavior than Black women. Our model does not account for the important variations in bias that women of different races experience.

So what’s to be done? Diversity trainings are common in companies, educational institutions and health care settings, but these may not have much effect when it comes to employees’ career advancement. The sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev found that after mandatory diversity trainings, the likelihood that women and men of color became managers either stayed the same or decreased, possibly because of backlash. Some anti-bias trainings have been shown to change behavior, but any approach needs to be evaluated, as psychologist Betsy Levy Paluck has said, “on the level of rigorous testing of medical interventions.”

We also explored a paradox. Research shows that in many fields, a greater proportion of men correlates with more bias againstwomen. At the same time, in fields or organizations where women make up the majority, men can still experience a “glass escalator,” being fast-tracked to senior leadership roles. School superintendents, who work in the women-dominated field of education but are more likely to be men, are one example. To make sense of this, we conceptualized bias at work as a combination of both organizational biases that can be influenced by organizational makeup and larger societal biases.

What we found was that if societal biases are strong compared with those in the organization, a powerful but brief intervention may have only a short-term impact. In our simulation, we tested this by introducing quotas — requiring that the majority of promotions go to women — in the context of low, moderate, or no societal bias. We made the quotas time-limited, as real world efforts to combat bias often take the form of short-term interventions.

Our quotas changed the number of women at upper levels of the corporate hierarchy in the short term, and in turn decreased the gender biases against women rising through the company ranks. But when societal biases were still a persistent force, disparities eventually returned, and the impact of the intervention was short-lived.

What works? Having managers directly mentor and sponsor women improves their chance to rise. Insisting on fair, transparent and objective criteria for promotions and assignments is essential, so that decisions are not ambiguous and subjective, and goal posts aren’t shifting and unwritten. But the effect of standardizing criteria, too, can be limited, because decision-makers can always override these decisions and choose their favored candidates.

Ultimately, I found in my research for the book, the mindset of leaders plays an enormous role. Interventions make a difference, but only if leaders commit to them. One law firm I profiled achieved 50 percent women equity partners through a series of dramatic moves, from overhauling and standardizing promotion criteria, to active sponsorship of women, to a zero-tolerance policy for biased behavior. In this case, the chief executive understood that bias was blocking the company from capturing all the available talent. Leaders who believe that the elimination of bias is essential to the functioning of the organization are more likely to take the kind of active, aggressive, and long-term steps needed to root out bias wherever it may creep into decision making.

HOW EVERYDAY SEXISM HARMS WOMEN

by Jessica Nordell and Yaryna Serkez

The Fight for Asian American Studies

After a year that put a spotlight on anti-Asian racism, students around the country have been petitioning their schools to create curriculums that reflect the moment.

On a Saturday afternoon in September, the kind of day most college students would spend sprawled on a quad, soaking up the moments that still feel like summer, the Dartmouth Asian American Student Collective was getting organized. Its members had gathered to finalize a mission statement and a petition to circulate across campus.

Their goal? Persuade the administration of Dartmouth College to create an Asian American studies program.

Lily Ren, who led the meeting with her classmate Maanasi Shyno, said that taking classes that centered Asian American experiences at Dartmouth helped her better understand her own identity. “Because I was so transformed by these classes, I thought: How many other students didn’t have the opportunity to also learn so much, just because there were so few of them offered and you couldn’t major or minor in it?” she said in an interview in November.

In the group’s statement, which was released in October with the petition, its members outline why they believe such a program is necessary today, citing widespread incidents of anti-Asian racism and violence. To date, the group has collected nearly 1,200 signatures from students, parents and faculty.

The fight for Asian American studies at Dartmouth dates back several decades and is part of a larger academic movement that began in the 1960s. Though there have been minor victories at Dartmouth — new classes, new hires — change has been incremental, and a full program has yet to be formalized.

But this time could be different. After all, Asian American studies programs have often come into being during times of social unrest and change, as a result of student activism.

Decades of Activism at Dartmouth

Ms. Shyno and Ms. Ren, both 20 and double majors in sociology and gender studies, were not always student activists. In April, however, they were attending a virtual town hall with Asian American alumni and faculty when, halfway through, someone asked who was leading the student movement at Dartmouth today. The response was a long silence, they said.

“All the students working on this prior burned out or graduated, which is unfortunately what happens with student movements,” Ms. Shyno said. “That’s when we decided that we could be the ones to start it up again.”

The Dartmouth Asian Pacific American Alumni Association has compiled a history of such activism in a timeline that dates back to 1979. The timeline also refers to peer institutions, like Cornell University, which started the first Asian American studies program in the Ivy League in 1987, and Northwestern University, which introduced its own program in 1999 — a few years after students participated in a nearly monthlong hunger strike, in which they refused to eat meals.

In 2001, seven Dartmouth professors proposed a list of initiatives, including an Asian American studies minor and a building to serve as a centralized hub for related programs. At the same time, the issue was gaining attention among students.

“When I arrived on campus, it was probably the first time, like many other Asian Americans, where I was really exposed to the history and study of our community,” said Morna Ha, who graduated from Dartmouth in 2004 and now serves as the alumni group’s chair of the subcommittee on Asian American studies.

As an undergraduate, Ms. Ha led an Asian American studies task force. “The work that we were doing then was similar, unfortunately, to a lot of the work that’s being done now,” she said.

After Ms. Ha graduated, several professors were hired to focus on Asian American studies. “But unfortunately,” she said, “Dartmouth has a really terrible track record of retaining these experts.”

Aimee Bahng, who started teaching in Dartmouth’s English department in 2009 and specialized in Asian American literature, was denied tenure in 2016. Students, concerned about the prospect of losing a mentor and faculty member of color, started organizing, posting on Twitter under the hashtags #Fight4FacultyOfColor and #DontDoDartmouth. The story made headlines, and there was even a Change.org petition written by Dartmouth faculty that received close to 4,000 signatures.

Diana Lawrence, the associate vice president for communications at Dartmouth, said in a statement: “Mathematically, there is no significant difference in tenure rates between women and men or between white and BIPOC faculty at Dartmouth.” The statement added that the college is “making notable progress in its efforts to recruit and retain faculty of color.”

Ms. Lawrence also wrote that “Dartmouth students who wish to major in Asian American studies may choose to do so regardless of whether there is a program currently in place. The College offers many courses in that area, including opportunities to study abroad.”

Ms. Bahng, now an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at Pomona College, said that the status of tenure holds the stakes of defining whether “a faculty member will be protected and job-secure in their effort to teach these subjugated knowledges and marginalized histories.”

“The push that Dartmouth is currently in,” Ms. Bahng added, “is informed by students and faculty members who’ve been through this before.”

The ‘Model Minority’ Myth

Twenty-one percent of Dartmouth’s class of 2025 is Asian American, according to the college’s admissions site. And across the United States, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group, almost doubling in size to 18.9 million from about 10.5 million between 2000 and 2019, according to the Pew Research Center.

Still, Asian American identity has been fraught in education. Because Asian Americans have been viewed as the “model minority” — stereotyped as high academic and financial achievers — institutions have not always considered them a protected class.

In 2020, a Washington State school district was the center of a controversy for excluding students of Asian descent from a category labeled “students of color” in a 2019 performance report. “While our intent was never to ignore Asian students as ‘students of color’ or ignore any systemic disadvantages they too have faced, we realize our category choices caused pain and had racist implications,” the district later responded in a statement.

Eng-Beng Lim, an associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Dartmouth, said that same attitude could in part be why the college has yet to form a program. “My students have reported stories of how the pushback from the upper administrators included sentiments about how Asian Americans are not a minority group,” he said.

The Fight for Asian American Studies

After a year that put a spotlight on anti-Asian racism, students around the country have been petitioning their schools to create curriculums that reflect the moment.

BACK TO HOME

In “Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet,” the NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Ali Vitali describes Amy Klobuchar’s well-honed political origin story. In her book, out this month, Vitali explains that Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator, was kicked out of the hospital just a day after giving birth to her daughter. This was a not-uncommon cost-cutting measure for insurance companies in the past, and Klobuchar was sent home even though her baby had to stay because of complications.

“It was the match to Klobuchar’s political fire,” Vitali writes, and it inspired her, as a private citizen, to lobby for a guaranteed 48 hours in the hospital together for moms and their newborns (a requirement later enshrined by the Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health Protection Act). This maternal activism kick-started Klobuchar’s legislative career, and ultimately led her to run for office.

She wasn’t the only candidate to tie her maternal identity to her “political fire” during the 2020 presidential election, Vitali points out. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York “centered her candidacy on womanhood: framing policy proposals around how they’d impact families, promising that ‘as a mom, I’ll fight for your family as hard as I fight for my own.’”

While I was reading Vitali’s book last week, news broke that some of the climate and tax provisions of Democrats’ original Build Back Better Plan, left for dead a few weeks ago, were being brought back to life as part of a pared-down bill called the Inflation Reduction Act. This is good news for anyone who cares about climate change and its impact on our children’s futures, but it’s still disappointing that several proposed investments from earlier drafts of Democrats’ plan for child care, universal preschool, child tax credits and elder care support have been dropped like a hot rock.

And I couldn’t help but notice that the senators mentioned in The Times’s coverage as having helped to resurrect the package — Joe Manchin, Chuck Schumer, Mark Warner, John Hickenlooper and Chris Coons — were all men who are ostensibly past needing parental leave, preschool or child care for their immediate families. In October, when The Washington Post reported on the “last-ditch effort by Democratic women to pressure Manchin and salvage paid family and medical leave,” it was moms leading that good fight, including Gillibrand and Senator Patty Murray of Washington.

Ideally, legislators who aren’t caretakers of young children would still see the profound value of things such as paid leave and child tax credits, which are also essential for the health of the next generation and society in general. Hopefully, they would also acknowledge that nearly half of Americans, including 41 percent of Republicans, think our country doesn’t do enough for parents, according to Pew Research. In my dreams, paid leave, which is available in nearly every other country, would not just be tacked onto enormous budget bills only to be sacrificed in the horse-trading process.

Since mothers are out in front fighting for these supports, we probably need more of them in positions of true power in our legislative and executive bodies. (I asked dads to start shouting about paid leave back in November, but they seem to have lost their voices.) As the midterms approach, I thought it would be a good moment to take a temperature check on how voters perceive candidates who are mothers. The overarching feeling, as Vitali put it to me when we spoke, is that mothers running for office are much better off than they once were, “but still with a lot of progress left to make.”

A particular bright spot is that more women are starting their political careers younger than their predecessors did, which may set them up to be in more powerful positions later on. Another is that motherhood is increasingly in the foreground of campaigns. In The Atlantic in 2018, Annika Neklason explained that “moms are not only seeking political seats, but seeking them explicitly, and proudly, as moms; in this year’s election cycle, motherhood has become an asset to be flaunted in progressive campaigns, resolving a decades-old tension for women seeking to enter electoral politics.”

It’s not just Democratic women, either. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, is also a new mom. In March, The Times’s Annie Karni reported on a House Republican retreat where Stefanik “was running the show, working the room with her 7-month-old son on her hip.” In 2019, Stefanik was part of a bipartisan group that introduced paid leave legislation that would allow families to receive advance child tax credits up to $5,000 during the first year of a child’s life or the first year after a child’s adoption — not as generous as I’d like to see at the federal level, but better than what we have now, which is nothing. And though paid leave is often framed as a Democratic priority, according to a Morning Consult poll from September: “Consistently, more than half of Republican women support paid family and medical leave, even when it’s framed as a Democratic proposal. Republican men, meanwhile, haven’t always been on board but are coming around on the idea.”

Politicians bringing their newborns to work and taking parental leave while in office is something new. It used to be that mothers mostly ran for office when their kids were older, said Corrine McConnaughy, a political scientist at Princeton University. “Nancy Pelosi is famously a mother of five, but also — as was not atypical of women navigating politics in her generation — waited until her kids were grown and then entered politics,” McConnaughy said. It matters that women are starting earlier, because unlike male politicians — Pete Buttigieg, who ran for president after a mere two terms as mayor of a small city, comes to mind — they “feel they need to be more qualified to succeed,” said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia. “They’re not going to throw their hat into the ring when they’ve been in the Senate for two years.”

In previous generations, there was criticism of women who aimed for high office while their kids were still at home. In her excellent book, “The Political Consequences of Motherhood,” Jill Greenlee, an associate professor of politics at Brandeis University, describes the way Geraldine Ferraro, the three-term New York congresswoman, faced a “chorus of criticism” while running for vice president in 1984, along the lines of: “I’m not voting for her because she belongs in the home, she belongs back with her kids, what the hell is she doing this for?”

“Ferraro and her family were the subject of public scrutiny, as was (and is) often the case when women step into new political roles,” Greenlee writes. “This forced Ferraro and her defenders to demonstrate her devotion as a mother while also promoting her professional credentials.”

By the time Sarah Palin, who was then Alaska’s Republican governor, ran for vice president in 2008, there was less cultural resistance to the idea of a mother in that role, though there was still intense, at times unfair, scrutiny of Palin’s family. Palin, who embraced a “hockey mom” image, herself declared “that she was part of a generation of women who have become used to juggling work and family and would not shy away from a political challenge,” Greenlee notes.

In the intervening 14 years, we keep moving forward, but a full acceptance of mothers as political powerhouses will take more time. Last year, Stefanik had to rebut a news report that suggested she might struggle to handle her legislative responsibilities as a new mom. According to a 2017 research paper from the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, voters still have concerns about women being able to balance family and political responsibilities.

The foundation presented survey respondents with four fictional candidates with no partisan identifiers: a married man with young children, a married woman with a young child, a single mother of young children and a never-married woman without children. Then, voters were presented with critiques “which focused on their ability to manage their family life and at the same time be effective office holders.” When the candidates pushed back, voters found the male candidate to be the most “convincing.” Though voters recognized “a double standard for moms,” they still participated in enforcing the double standard.

Still, “a more diverse array of women are putting themselves forward as candidates,” said Lawless, and the more different kinds of mothers who prove that they can govern, the more it will become a nonissue. Vitali mentioned Katie Porter of California and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, both Democrats, as members of the House who are mothers of school-age children and part of the national conversation. “Women are taking up this space as mothers and power brokers” that they didn’t used to, Vitali said. Maybe that will eventually lead to building back something that won’t topple.

Would We Have Paid Parental Leave if More Moms Were in Congress?

by Jessica Grose

DAVE BARRY'S YEAR IN REVIEW

December 2022

I recently turned 83, and while there are many joys to getting older, getting out of taxis is not one of them.

What you don’t want to do is get your left foot caught under the front right seat before you try to swing your right foot toward the door; otherwise, you’ll topple over while attempting to pay the fare, possibly injuring your ankle, and causing the maneuver to go even more slowly. If you make it past the taxi door, there is still the one-foot jump to the street. You’re old. You could fall. Happens all the time.

And that’s when it’s just you in the taxi. If some other old person is with you — a friend, a spouse — there’s a real possibility of never getting out of the vehicle. You might live out the rest of your days in the back seat, watching Dick Cavett do real estate ads on a loop.

“Old People Getting Out of Taxis.” I was thinking of making a film with that title, if I knew how to make a film. Figure it would run four hours. I asked an actor friend, also old, if he’d star in it. His response: “If I can get out of my chair.”

It’s no joke, old age. It just looks funny. Mel Brooks latched on to this in his 1977 film “High Anxiety” with Professor Lilloman (pronounced “little old man”), a stock character who moves at a turtle’s pace, mumbles and whines as he goes, equally irritated and irritating.

I used to find the professor a lot funnier than I do now. Slow? Merely to rise to my feet in a restaurant takes so much angling and fulcrum searching, the waitstaff takes bets on whether I will do it at all.

Old age isn’t what the books promised it would be. Literature is littered with old people for whom the years have brought some combination of wisdom, serenity, authority and power — King Lear, the ageless priest in Shangri-La, Miss Marple, Mr. Chips, Mrs. Chips (I made that up), Dickens’s Aged P, crazy Mrs. Danvers. In fiction, old folks are usually impressive and in control. In life, something less.

I can’t think of anyone who has come to me for wisdom, serenity, authority or power. People do come to sell me life insurance for $9 a month and medicines such as Prevagen, which is advertised on TV as making one sharper and improving one’s memory. Of course, that is beneficial only to those who have more things they wish to remember than to forget.

One thing I need to remember is which day for which doctor. Two years ago, my wife and I moved back to New York City after 24 years of living by the sea. The city is safer, we thought — just in case we may ever need to be near medical facilities. Since our move, not a day has passed without one of us seeing a doctor, arranging to see one or thinking or talking about seeing one.

What They Don't Tell You about Getting Old by Roger Rosenblatt

The World Cup, in a major upset, is won by the plucky underdog national team of Qatar, which did not, technically, win any games, but nevertheless is awarded the championship trophy thanks to what FIFA officials describe as “a huge amount of sportsmanship.”

In a historic milestone for the U.S. space program, the Artemis 1 spacecraft, after a 25½-day voyage that took it past the Moon to a point 260,000 miles out in space, returns to Earth to pick up the crew. “From now on,” states a red-faced NASA spokesperson, “we’re going to make sure they’re on board before we launch.”

On the political front, there’s a refreshing new “vibe” in Washington as the two major parties, finally past the toxic nastiness of the midterm elections, look forward to the new year — an opportunity to end the cynical partisan gamesmanship and instead seek common ground in a sincere effort to solve the problems that the American people actually care about, such as the epidemic of illegal drugs that we apparently ingested before writing this sentence.

Because in reality there is no new vibe in Washington. Washington is “Groundhog Day” with Congress as Bill Murray. The only change is that the Republicans have narrowly regained control of the House of Representatives, which means they can spend the next two years seeking revenge on the Democrats. For example, they could form a House Select Committee to investigate the House Select Committee that investigated January 6. Of course, the Democrats still control the Senate, which means they could retaliate by forming a Senate Select Committee to investigate the House Select Committee investigating the House Select Committee that investigated January 6. Thus the legislative branch of the federal government could spend the next two years probing itself, like some kind of deranged proctologist.

And if that isn’t enough political excitement, we can also look forward to two soul-sucking years of buildup to the 2024 presidential election, which could very well wind up being a contest between — speaking of “Groundhog Day” — Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That’s right: The voting public could face a choice between two men who are both, according to the polls, unpopular with more than half of the voting public, and who will both be older, in 2024, than the Adirondack mountains. But that’s the kind of quirky political scenario we sometimes wind up with in this country, thanks to the unique system of government created by our Founding Fathers, who are rotating in their graves like hot dogs on an airport food-vendor grill.

So at the moment the situation appears grim. And yet there are plenty of reasons to feel hopeful about the future. To name just a few: (NOTE TO EDITOR — Please insert some reasons to feel hopeful about the future, if you can think of any).

Thus it is with a feeling of guarded optimism that we, as a nation, reach the end of this disturbing year and, thankfully, enter the holiday season. The festivities are somewhat subdued this year, as inflation forces consumers to cut back; according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Conifer Statistics, the Median Household Christmas Tree Height (MHCTH), which last year was “LeBron James,” currently stands at “Danny DeVito.”

But it’s still the holidays, a time when we gather with loved ones from near and far, assuming the ones from far were able to sell enough blood plasma to afford the airfare. So let’s forget about the year we just went through. Let’s give our loved ones a big old holiday hug, and enjoy this moment.

And on New Year’s Eve, as we prepare, nervously, to face 2023, let’s be sure to have a big calming bowl of ice water handy when the clock reaches midnight, and we say:

Happy New (GLUB).

Hey, it’s election season! Think about it: A year from now, we should know who the next president is going to be and …

Stop beating your head against the wall. Before we start obsessing over the candidates, let’s spend just a few minutes mulling the big picture. Really big. Today, we’re going to moan about the Electoral College.

Yes! That … system we have for actually choosing a president. The one that makes who got the most votes more or less irrelevant. “The exploding cigar of American politics,” as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice called it over the phone.

Whoever gets the most electoral votes wins the White House. And the electoral votes are equal to the number of representatives and senators each state has in Washington. Right now that means — as I never tire of saying — around 193,000 people in Wyoming get the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.

It’s possible the system was quietly hatched as a canny plot by the plantation-owning Southerners to cut back on the power of the cities. Or it’s possible the founders just had a lot on their minds and threw the system together at the last minute. At the time, Waldman noted, everybody was mainly concerned with making sure George Washington was the first president.

Confession: I was hoping to blame the whole Electoral College thing on Thomas Jefferson, who’s possibly my least favorite founding father. You know — states’ rights and Sally Hemings. Not to mention a letter he once wrote to his daughter, reminding her to wear a bonnet when she went outside because any hint of the sun on her face would “make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.” But Jefferson was someplace in France while all this Electoral College stuff was going on, so I’m afraid it’s not his fault.

Anyway, no matter how it originally came together, we’ve now put the loser of the popular vote in office five times. Three of those elections were more than a century ago. One involved the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who won in 1876 even though the electoral vote was virtually tied and Samuel Tilden easily won the popular vote. But the Republicans made a deal with Southern Democrats to throw the election Hayes’s way in return for a withdrawal of federal troops from the South, which meant an end to Reconstruction and another century of disenfranchisement for Black voters in the South.

Really, every time I get ticked off about the way things are going in our country, I keep reminding myself that Samuel Tilden had it worse. Not to mention the Black voters, of course.

Here’s the real, immediate worry: Our current century is not even a quarter over and we’ve already had the wrong person in the White House twice. George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 — many of you will remember the manic counting and recounting in Florida, which was the tipping point state. (Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, in part thanks to Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot. If you happen to see Robert Kennedy Jr. anytime soon, remind him of what hopeless third-party contenders can do to screw up an election.)

And then Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump decisively in the popular vote — by about 2.8 million votes, coming out ahead by 30 percentage points in California and 22.5 percentage points in New York. But none of that mattered when Trump managed to eke out wins by 0.7-point margins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, not to mention his 0.3-point victory in Michigan.

By the way, does anybody remember what Clinton did when she got this horrible news? Expressed her dismay, then obeyed the rules and conceded. Try to imagine how Trump would behave under similar circumstances.

OK, don’t. Spare yourselves.

Sure, every vote counts. But it’s hard not to notice that every vote seems to count a whole lot more if you happen to be registered in someplace like Michigan, where the margin between the two parties is pretty narrow. After her loss, Clinton did wonder how much difference it might have made if she’d taken “a few more trips to Saginaw.”

On the other side of the equation, Wyoming is the most Republican state, with nearly 60 percent of residents identifying with the G.O.P. and just about a quarter saying they’re Democrats. Nobody is holding their breath to see which way Wyoming goes on election night.

But if you’re feeling wounded, Wyoming, remember that presidential-election-wise, every citizen of Wyoming is worth almost four times as much as a Californian.

OK, don’t. Spare yourselves.

But if you’re feeling wounded, Wyoming, remember that presidential-election-wise, every citizen of Wyoming is worth almost four times as much as a Californian.

The Exploding Cigar of American Politics

by Gail Collins

An Updage on the Electoral College