August 26 – National Webmistress Day

nPosted on August 26, 2019

Key Points

nThere has been, for quite a few decades now, a movement away from sexist and gender-specific job titles. For example, not every police officer is a policeman – but when I was a little kid, we’d only hear policeman-policeman-policeman all day long, and maybe once a year we’d hear “police woman” – and there would be a moment of shock as everyone absorbed the fact that women can help police our cities, too!

The change to “police officer” has been a good change. Andother job titles have changed to be more fair and inclusive. Firefighter, server, flight attendant, and supervisor are all more descriptive and inclusive than fireman, waitress, stewardess, and foreman.
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nSome job titles haven’t needed a change – doctor, judge, senator, astronaut, and teacher are all examples – and some job titles are only now starting to change – like “actor” for women and non-binary people as well as for men.

nIsn’t it strange to see how convoluted language was when, back in the day, people thought it so very important that a person’s gender MUST be front and center? Like calling a pilot (or aviator) who happens to be a woman an “aviatrix”? Have you ever heard someone called an authoress or comedienne, a poetess or an usherette? All those words used to be used but were thankfully dropped for author, comedian, poet, and usher for people of any gender.

nWell, today’s holiday puts a gender-specific job title front and center!

nNational Webmistress Day?

nWhat’s a webmistress?

Not that kind of web mistress!

nWell, you have probably heard of a webmaster – It’s the person who creates and/or maintains a particular website.

nIn other words, a web master is a web developer.

nNotice that master was once a gendered word that was always associated with men and boys. The feminine version of the word master was mistress – and it may still be in some places, but for the most part, at least in the U.S., mistress has evolved to mean something other than “owner of the pet in question” or “female head of the household in question” or any other use of the respected title Mistress.

nLet’s go back to the word mastery – knowledge of a skill, accomplishment in an area, maybe even superiority of knowledge or accomplishment. If a girl is a master of disguise, she’s really, really good at going undercover. If a man is a master thief, he’s known for having way better skills than the average criminal. If a woman earns a Master’s Degree in political science, that’s evidence of quite a few classes and probably a thesis in that field.

This is Russian chess
grandmaster Tatiana
Anatolyevna Kosintseva.

nA person who has mastery in a field – like website design or maintenance – can be called a master in that field. And that has nothing to do with the fact that a long-ago gentleman used to be called master of the house, or that a knight’s son was addressed as Master So-and-so.

nAll of which begs the question: why-oh-why would the people who made this day call a female webmaster a webmistress?

nThis is one of those light (non-serious) uses of gendered language meant to raise our consciousness of our unrecognized assumptions and biases. If I talked about a webmaster of a company, and then a different webmaster of a school district, and then a third webmaster, this one working for the National Organization for Women…you might assume (without even knowing you were assuming) that all three webmasters were men. Even the one working for NOW!

Type “computer geek” or “hacker,”
“web master” or “web developer”
into your web browser, and check out
the people in the images.

Mostly male?

nIn 2016, two-thirds of all web developers were male – which means that one third was female. It might be a little bit more even by now. With a majority (but not an overwhelming majority) of webmaster being men, some people assume that any given one is a man. But of course, those people would be wrong quite often. I gather that using the word-that-isn’t-really-a-word webmistress, the holiday creators were trying to point out that an awful lot of webmasters are women!

nSo:

nNational WebMistress Day recognizes women in web development. We are urged to email a female web developer thanking her for a job well done, plus submitting positive reviews on social media, endorsing on LinkedIn, giving a shout-out on Facebook and Twitter, and liking and sharing her posts or pages.