After years of feeling vaguely deflated each time I read the Gazette’s “A Look Back” column, which reprints excerpts from the paper printed exactly 10, 25, 50, 100 or 200 years prior, I undertook a quantitative experiment.

For six weeks, I tracked the following stats in “A Look Back”: 1) gender references in the column’s text and photos, 2) references to higher elevation titles assigned to males and females, and 3) public places, institutions and awards named after males versus females.

My findings? Males were cited, photographed and had high elevation titles associated with their names over 3.5 times more often than females. More stark, I counted 15 times (30 versus 2) more public places, institutions and awards named after men than women — some obvious (Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Forbes Library, Calvin Theater, Belchertown), and some that I had to Google (Herter Hall, Kendrick Park, Orr Rink, Hopkins Academy, Bentley College, Salvo House). All but one such commemorated man held strings of power in their lifetimes — they were politicians, business leaders, landowners and wealthy donors. All but one were white.

And what were females, equal in population size, doing as males’ lives were being assiduously recorded, elevated, and memorialized? As a third of the female faces in “A Look Back” photos might suggest, they were giddy school girls: Girl Scouts peddling cookies or joy riding in the back of a local police car; cheerleaders fawning over the injured foot of a male basketball star. Girls modeling “summer and cruise fashion wear” for a festival of spring fashions. Girls vying for the titles of “Winter Carnival Queen,” “Miss Colleen Beauty Pageant” and “Alternate Massachusetts Dairy Princess.”

Certainly, a small portion of women mentioned in the last 25 years were assuming leadership positions — mayor, congresswoman, chief of police and school superintendent. But that is not the take-away impression of women’s place in history when you read “A Look Back.” Nor is it what gets reinforced unconsciously in our psyches each time we utter, many times a day, the public places and things named after men.

Consider this choice snippet: A 50-year “Look Back” from the Jan. 18, 1971 Gazette (printed at the height of the so-called Women’s Liberation movement): “The Mr. and Mrs. Club of St. Michael’s School is planning to hold its annual ‘Country Store’ in March, under the direction of Mrs. Irving Guerin and Mrs. John Cycz, co-chairmen.”

As a longtime volunteer myself, I can confidently report that volunteer activities tend to be overwhelmingly female-dominated, as I imagine they were 50 years ago. That the two above-mentioned volunteer leaders were referenced solely by their husbands’ names and “co-chairmen” title exemplifies the sort of effortless usurpation of female contributions by men over the centuries, and illuminates why women have always earned, and continue to earn, pennies on a man’s dollar. Not only do we give away our work for free, we don’t even get credit for it.

What began as a faint suspicion became a blinding truth: The words and photos we print, reprint and read, the gender we entitle and memorialize, and the manner that we record and cherry pick our history reinforce our patriarchal legacy.

The saying “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it” applies here. Like racism, patriarchy persists in the permanent architecture of our community. It is part of the caste system we built brick by brick, whose infrastructure remains hidden in plain sight and whose existence continues to impede those seeking equal worth and full agency. So what do we do about it?

Let’s start by talking. A robust, open civic discussion of how and whether we “name” things is precisely the conversation our community can and should undertake at this important time of reckoning. What is the base motivation and what public good, if any, does it accomplish?

We have spent centuries colonizing, exploiting, and assuming control of places, people, and things by naming them. Individually and cumulatively, these actions have brought harm and driven diverse species and cultures on earth to near extinction. Let’s examine this deeply insecure need to name. Let’s unpack it, and then let’s fix it.

Lilly Lombard is a resident of Northampton.