When, as Flanders and Swann once sang, you get no gas at all, the person to call is the gas man.
No longer. British Gas has decreed that using “man” disrespects the female engineers among its staff and is hindering efforts to attract new recruits.
It has even contacted the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) asking that it replace the term “gas man” with “gas engineer”.
Such a move would also require a rewriting of cultural history. As well as Michael Flanders and Donald Swann’s 1960s song The Gas Man Cometh, in 1991 the comedian Rik Mayall framed an episode of his sitcom Bottom around the gas man calling to read the meter at Richie and Eddie’s flat, when they had illegally connected a pipeline to their neighbour’s gas supply. A more gritty example is Gasman, a short 1998 film by Lynne Ramsay about working-class life in Glasgow in the 1970s through the eyes of a child who discovers their father’s infidelity.
Whether “gas engineer” becomes a catalyst for a fresh flowering of creativity remains to be seen but British Gas is determined to encourage its use. Its first battle is with the OED, which defines gas man as “a man who works for a gas company, repairing gas appliances in people’s houses, or checking how much gas they have used”.
Joanna Flowers, 40, who has worked for British Gas for 12 years, said: “Nine times out of ten when I arrive to fix a problem, the door is answered with a sense of shock that a woman has arrived to take a look.” When asked how many of its engineers were women, British Gas said that 17 per cent of its science, technology and engineering recruits last year were women.
Oxford University Press said: “Both ‘gas engineer’ and ‘gas man’ are in the OED. The OED is a historical dictionary, recording the evolution of the language. While we would not replace ‘gas man’ with ‘gas engineer’, as it’s a usage that has existed, if evidence shows that ‘gas man’ is no longer widely used it could be labelled as historical.”