Category talk:American women novelists

Terrible choice
Not sure if it was intentional or not, but by separating this subcategory out, someone has effectively taken all female novelists off of the main list of American Novelists. This is insane. Please, someone with a better knowledge of wikipedia, fix this immediately. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.193.217.171 (talk) 18:25, 24 April 2013 (UTC)


 * As pointed out in the New York Times op-ed www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/wikipedias-sexism-toward-female-novelists.html, removing women (bur not men) the category of "American Novelists" on the basis that women (but not men) should be in a subcategory is rather blatently sexist.  I suggest going through the Category:American women novelists files and putting every writer on this list back into the Category: American novelists.  Geoffrey.landis (talk) 02:31, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * This makes the assumption that the American Novelists list wouldnt be renamed "american male novelists" once the seperation (due to the list being too long, also stated in that NF Tyles article). its not sexisim. and theres allready lists like this for other categories! just give the girl power stuff a rest for 5 minuites so you can see what happens instead of Knee-jerk reacting to everything. look. THEN leap. 216.57.96.1 (talk) 18:45, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Gee, if this segregation is happening because the list is too long, then why not make the sub-categories even smaller by splitting it up by race? Then, 'List of American journalists' could default to white folks instead of men! Of course, that would be racist, just like removing women from the main category to a sub-category is sexist. What is so hard for some people to understand about this? Vegemarmalade (talk) 02:13, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
 * One other thing, where do you plan on putting intersex, transgender, and genderqueer writers? Vegemarmalade (talk) 02:17, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Agreed. A nonsense, pointless category with (intentional or otherwise) very sexist overtones. Euchrid (talk) 07:06, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * This happens a lot in sports. Try sorting Category:National association football teams that by men and women, you know where gender actually matters based on rules, and see how far "men's national football" team as a subcat gets you. --LauraHale (talk) 11:03, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * You're saying novels are sold in male and female book stores? 174.62.69.11 (talk) 03:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Geoffrey, I third your idea. Let's bring all American novelists back in to the same fold. jareha (comments) 17:13, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Salon has noticed too: --Tannakin  —Preceding undated comment added 15:50, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I have some confidence that the separation of women novelists from the list of real American novelists was not meant malevolently, but now that the New York Times has brought attention to the problem and rightly pointed out the inherent and flagrant sexism involved in this move, I trust that this women's page will be immediately reintegrated into the list of real novelists.--Georgiasouthernlynn (talk) 18:01, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * are you somehow implying that female novelists are not real novelists? the seperation is being done (according to the ny times article) because the list is getting TOO LONG. completely reasonable, imo. and everyone seems to be making the assumption that the current list wouldn't be renamed "american Male Novelists" once this cleaning up is concluded. 216.57.96.1 (talk) 18:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Why is the separation male/female and not time period? 174.62.69.11 (talk) 03:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Wow will you guys/gals sorry...gals/guys calm yourselves? I'm fairly confident this was a simple misunderstanding or at most a slightly misguided effort at more clarity. I've never seen any evidence that wikipedia is some secret misogynistic society. Just because some outside commentators view everything through the prism of men trying to put one over women doesn't mean we have cast editing some code to make an obscure subcategory on some obscure academic topic as an evil scheme. Wasn't there something here about assuming good faith? Jarwulf (talk) 18:37, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. In this case, the stupidity of mistaking a subset relationship for a mutually exclusive relationship is indicative of a pervasive societal problem -- that 'lady X's' are not 'real X's', or better put, marginalization of women, especially in arenas where they are the minority. The faster these errors get pointed out and fixed without ad hominem attacks on the person pointing them out and defensiveness on the part of those who have made the mistake, the better. –z7 2001:4898:0:FFF:0:5EFE:A7B:3D24 (talk) 20:38, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Has anyone seen a plan or proposal before late April to remove women from the category American novelists? I have not been able to find one. There is a claim that there is one in the NY Times article, but I'm not seeing it on the talk page for either American novelists or American women novelists or on the Category Discussion pages. In fact, a bunch of the women novelists' pages who are in American women novelists never had "American novelists" as a category. They can have both categories, by the way! --Lizzard (talk) 19:07, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Categories are not lists. We have List of United States novelists.  That still has males and females.  The fact of the matter is for a very long time we have Category:American women writers, we did not put people in that category directly in Category:American writers and no one has yet even brought that situation up.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:10, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Some professional malcontent with too much time on their hands noticed an opportunity to be offended, get attention, and make the more sensitive editors run around like chickens with their heads cut off. End of story. Does anybody seriously believe that there is so malevolent conspiracy to denigrate women by changing wikipedia subcatagories? Jarwulf (talk) 19:24, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

When you remove them from the American novelists list? Yes, there is that suggestion. 24.244.15.65 (talk) 19:28, 25 April 2013 (UTC) Betty


 * Yes, a conspiricy called sexism. Neonorange (talk) 20:56, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * In March 2006, yes 7 years ago, the user community on the Swedish-language Wikipedia found consensus to remove its category for women's soccer clubs and has since decided to only have gender-neutral categories. This was not only for political correctness, but an easy way to avoid a lot of pointless and time-consuming conflicts. --LA2 (talk) 20:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

FYI, two active discussions relevant to this category are ongoing at Category_talk:American_novelists and Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_24.--Carwil (talk) 03:16, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree that this discussion here should be suspended, since the other discussion(s) have ore particpants ... we need to focus in one place ... probably Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_24. --Noleander (talk) 10:15, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

How about "American female novelists" rather than "American women novelists"?
If this category is kept, it *really* should be renamed "American female novelists" rather than its current ungrammatical name. Think: what is the counterpart article going to be called when it's renamed - "American male novelists" or "American men novelists"? The former is the obvious grammatical choice, and "female" should be the obvious adjective for the title of this article. Peter G Werner (talk) 20:47, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * The reanme proposal would be much better to bring up in the CfD discussion. That said, I would oppsoe it vehemently.  The common term is "woman writer" not "female writer".John Pack Lambert (talk) 07:08, 26 April 2013 (UTC)


 * What is the basis for the assertion that 'The common term is "woman writer" not "female writer"'? Certainly Google indicates a preference for "female writer" when one means to reference Austen, Woolf, Bronte, Eliot, Morrison, et al. "Woman writer" actually seems to have a distinct meaning that indicates the writer is writing in a style or on subjects specific to women, or what the French call écriture féminine. 24.127.187.46 (talk) 05:43, 29 April 2013 (UTC)


 * It seems to me that the most natural rendering would be "Female American novelists". In the presence of a dispute about which term is most common, evidence would be helpful. -GTBacchus(talk) 09:55, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Google scholar searches produce about twice as many hits for "women writers" as "female writers".John Pack Lambert (talk) 00:59, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I really hope this category doesn't get merged or deleted
It's important to have women listed in both categories (American women novelists and American novelists) - this is a critical category for women's studies and those seeking easy access to American women novelists. Just my two cents! SarahStierch (talk) 18:39, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

There are better ways to do this though, like having a filter to show women or men in a category, not by separating them into a sub-category.

This is a non-diffusing subcategory
This is an important subcategory, but Wikipedia's categorization guidelines clearly state that subcategories defined by ethnicity or gender are non-diffusing. As such, American women novelists should be listed here as well as in the American novelist category.Jlaffan (talk) 22:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
 * However should it not diffuse Category:American women writers and Category:Women novelists? Things being non-diffusing is not very straight forward, especially since I can show categories like Category:American Latter-day Saints hymnwriters that is totally diffused from Category:American hymnwriters.John Pack Lambert (talk) 01:01, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It turns out that the "distinguished subcategory" template has a place for the parent category(ies) it does not diffuse. For now, this is stated correctly on the page. (One could debate the notability of this category, but I see no reason it should not diffuse Category:American women writers and Category:Women novelists so long as it exists.)--Carwil (talk) 16:41, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

the brouhaha seems to have died down
And after all that, we now have 1800 women novelists categorized here (as opposed to ~500 previously when Category gate started). to me, this is a great example of the system working. However, there are still around 6700 novelists, total, but only around 4000 categorized in either men/women categories. If any hardcore categorizers want to help fix this, use this search that can help identify novelists that are missing male/female categories (currently returns around 1500).

We should also check the other way, to make sure there aren't any women or men novelists that *aren't* in one of the generic century categories (which is more or less the "ghettoization" that led to this mess) - this search does that for women and for men which currently shows a few outliers. This will have to be monitored over time, but the above links should always work.)--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 15:34, 23 July 2013 (UTC)