He/She
t-shirt yarn, window blind fabric, ink, wood, and paint
144”x48”x50”, 2015
His/Her
computed image on photo paper
2 images – 44″x55″ each
One indication of the value of women versus men in our social landscape is how often each appears in the news. For this work approximately 500,000 words were extracted from the NY Times website on January 20, 2015 by web-scraping eight levels deep. Considering the number of occurrences of the words “he” and “she” reveals textual gender bias. There are approximately two “hes” for every “she” present. How does this reflect societal values? Without data collection and analysis this bias is invisible given the limited amount of text we see at one time while reading a news site page. This work makes this bias tangible, where “he” and “she” occur in direct proportion to that found on the website.
The portraits are composed from text. The female portrait is made up of the most 40 most common words that follow “her” that do not occur in the 40 most common words that follow “his”. The male portrait is made up of the most 40 most common words that follow “his” that do not occur in the 40 most common words that follow “her”.