Globe and Mail coins new term, but still can't shake sexist language

I suppose I should be grateful for small favours.  The Globe and Mail's article on recent trends of the single parent family has a headline that reads "More Canadian parents going it alone", seemingly admitting that parenting is frequently a joint affair engaged in by both mothers and fathers.

And yet, the blessedly-unagenda'd headline is smashed into aggrieved fragments with the article's first paragraph:

The number of single mothers in Canada rose nearly 70 per cent over the past two decades, while the number of men going it alone as the head of the family doubled, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.

Ah...the poignant, belittling power of the phrase "single mother" and the tedious notion of the male position of "head of the household" together at last, thankfully offered in close conjunction so that any halfwit might see women's latent inferiority.  Yummy.

As for the article itself, I'm fairly ambivalent.  Echoes of the above sort of knee-jerk jerkiness from the daily filter through the rest of the piece, though it introduces the usefully stigma-free phrase "lone parent":

In a new report, the government agency said there were 555,000 women between the ages of 25 and 54 acting as the lone parent to children under the age of 18.

In 1981, that figure was 330,000.

Similarly, the number of lone fathers nearly doubled to 119,000 in 2001, from 62,000 in 1981. By 2001, fathers headed one in six of all lone-parent families in Canada.

One in six single-parent families is HEADED by a man, yet women ACT as the lone parent to the other five.  Maybe I'm too picky, but I just can't quite shrug off the connotations of author Terry Weber's chosen language.

As is expected, the income rates for lone mothers are half of what a lone father makes - $19K vs $38K, though there is some good news on the education front:

In 1981, 46 per cent of lone mothers had not completed high school. By comparison, 42 per cent of mothers with spouses hadn't finished high school.

By 2001, just 17 per cent of lone mothers were without a high-school diploma.

Now if only we could do something about the Globe and Mail's level of education - surely they can afford to be a bit more tolerant in their language?

Comments

[Steph]

I don't think you're being picky at all.

What I thought was interesting was that in 5 of 6 single-parent families there are men who were responsible for creating the children but don't seem to be doing the parenting.

And how the hell does anyone (with kids or not) live on 19k?

Now that's a story...

[bucky]

wow, that's a surprisingly blatant bias for newsprint. oh, the horrors of blindness.