IEEE Spectrum published this letter in the online supplement to their Dec. 2007 issue. Unfortunately, it's no longer available on their website, so you'll just have to believe me.
Dear editors,
If you really are committed to welcoming more women into engineering, then the executive editor's response to Judith Soukup's letter ("Invisible Women", Sep. 2007) is the wrong approach. I appreciate that you printed her letter, even while I agree with you that the sentence she quotes is harmless enough. Unfortunately, your response is not so harmless.
You spend 8 words apologizing. The remaining 40+ words defend your publication in a tone that, frankly, strikes me as patronizing. It certainly does not convince me that you took Soukup's complaint seriously.
You argue that it's not just the male sex that would get a kick out of X-ray specs. But I'm afraid you're missing the point, even if it was not clearly stated by Soukup. One could argue that, while the sentence in itself is gender-free, well-known cultural stereotypes cause the reader to picture the teenager, by default, as male. This is partly why many respected publications avoid using "he" and "him" as gender-neutral pronouns: technically they are not biased, but psychologically they are.
You also point out that one of the article's authors is female. Therefore the article cannot possibly be sexist? I disagree. Just like men, women are brought up in a culture infested with stereotypes about women and men. Letters like Soukup's should not inspire a war between the sexes, but rather a joint effort of men and women to examine how we communicate as a field and whether that communication style is likely to attract the best minds to engineering, regardless of their sex, nationality, economic status, etc.
What I find missing in your response, between the apology and the defense, is the effort to examine how IEEE Spectrum either reflects or departs from sexist stereotypes about engineering and engineers. In the future, when a reader charges your publication with bias, I hope your response will be to open and encourage dialogue, rather than to shut it down immediately as you did this time.
Sincerely,
Jaymie Strecker
IEEE Student Member