Gender-specific summaries on unisex tropes

Copied from the following thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=131429&type=att

I brought up the issue in another ATT ages ago (though very little to nothing was done) so here we go again:

I noticed that a few tropes are presented as being Always Male or Always Female even though they can apply to all genders.

The first time I noticed this trend was in Stepford Smiler, as even now the summary specifically talks about the woman being depressed and uses almost exclusively "she/her" pronouns in the summary, with only a few extra lines using "they/them". Meanwhile there are countless non-female examples of the trope in this page.

Another one I noticed was "Well Done, Son" Guy, which obviously by the title specifically describes a father/son relationship in the summary.

This trope is currently in the Unisex Tropes index, which specifies that the tropes in it can apply to both genders despite what the title may indicate. Very recently I came across a few examples in a work I'm troping (is that a verb here?) that are about a mother/son relationship - a son being terrified of disappointing his mother - without being a Momma's Boy; I checked.

I haven't gone through the entire Unisex Tropes index, but I'm fairly certain that these two are not the only tropes with this issue. Is there anything that can be done about this?

Edited by Lermis on Feb 7th 2024 at 5:32:17 PM

There's a difference between "this trope is technically unisex but significantly more common with this gender" and "Always Male and Always Female". The former may still justify a gendered description.

Relatedly, some tropes may have just evolved to become more unisex through the years. "Well Done, Son" Guy for instance would naturally be skewed towards accomplished, distant fathers, because restricted gender roles made accomplished, distant mothers rarer than they are today. That would not mean that a mom couldn't be an example, however.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 7th 2024 at 2:44:44 PM

Still, I think that some summaries need to be updated - ESPECIALLY the Stepford Smiler one. Sure, it may elaborate a bit on the origin of the trope but it's just so overwhelmingly female-leaning for a trope that has as many male as female examples. I mean, I did not do an exact count to see male to female ratio, but I have personaly seen more male examples listed on this site than female ones.

On a bit of a tangent, I feel like a risk with having very gender-specific summaries is that tropers may end up un/consciously associating the trope with a specific gender, and miss perfectly valid examples.

(In the case of Stepford Smiler, I think it's a good thing that both the trope image and quote are about male characters.)

True, those were those miniscule attempts I noted to make the trope description more inclusive. Back when I first brought up Stepford Smiler on ATT, the image was taken from the trope namer (it was a woman with a fake smile). However, the current fixes feel more like someone slapped a patch on it more than anything.