Bad news if you’re an American, a novelist and a woman: Wikipedia has decided that you don’t count as an American Novelist and have to go in your own sex specific sub-section called Women American Novelists. Well, not Wikipedia itself – Wikipedia is a platform, not a unified entity, and it makes no more sense to talk about it as the possessor of a single corporate mind than it does to imagine that your Facebook feed is the carefully curated output of one editor. Better to say instead that certain Wikipedians decided the best way to organise fiction was with women on the outside.
Since Amanda Filipacchi drew attention to this in the New York Times, there has been a lot of serious discussion on the the American Novelists talk page, as editors work out how to resolve such a highly scrutinised issue. A few have defended it as a neutral decision designed to reduce an untenably huge category, but to most involved, the sexism seems obvious: such a system of ordering makes men the default type of human, and women a subset. One contributor suggests creating the category American Men Novelists as a solution, only to be hit with the objection that this would leave the parent category populated solely by those who identify as neither male nor female — a curiously narrow group to represent the literature of a nation.
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