Relative frequencies of "he" and "she"

[cdybedahl]

I was playing around with Google NGram Viewer a bit, and got a result looks a bit odd to me.

What the NGram Viewer does, by the way, is display the usage frequency of given words over a period of time. The source material it uses is (in this case) Google's vast collection of scanned books. Some graphs look quite predictable. The word "nuclear" increases vastly in use during the early 1940s, for example. And "internet" in the mid-90s.

After I while I got the idea to compare "he" and "she", to see if their relative frequencies look like they might be related to the general level of gender equality in the English-speaking world. Over the time from 1800 to 2010, "she" shows a slow but mostly increasing trend, and "he" a considerably faster and clearer decreasing trend. So over time their relative uses get closer. Which, I think, makes sense as the relative position of women in our society have slowly been getting better over the past century.

But then something weird happens. In the late 1990s, the usage frequency of "he" starts going up sharply. The use of "she" also increases notably, but not quite as much. The difference between them increases for the first time since the 1960s. Have a look for yourselves.

So what does this mean? Are society becoming less egalitarian? And, since the use of singular personal pronouns are increasing, are we becoming more individual-oriented?

Comments

[dolores_crane]

Certainly in academic writing, there was a vogue for using 'she' as a generic pronoun in the 1980s and 1990s, and there's been a backlash since: in general I think the idea that male experience is universal and female experience is gendered has come back in a big way since the turn of the millennium, and this data would support that!

[watervole]

I wonder if it's related to the way we use names in general. It used to be that people were routinely referred to by their surnames. "Johnson did this, Smith did that."

Now, we tend not to do that quite so much. Maybe we use pronouns more instead, at least in written English.