The Perils of Gendered Language

It’s easy to see gender inequality as perpetuated by a few toxically masculine men, but gender bias is embedded in our social systems in many subtle ways too. One system that scientists have been investigating for its contribution to gender inequality and the devaluing of women is language.

What does it mean for a language to be gendered? It is the extent to which languages make a distinction between female/feminine words and male/masculine words, and there are different degrees to which this happens. Some languages, such as Finnish, have few gendered words outside of male-female, not even the pronouns he or she. Other languages, such as English, include gendered pronouns. Still others, such as Spanish, go further by including grammatical gender, for example, dividing nouns into groups representing the masculine (indicated by the articles el and une) and the feminine (indicated by la and una).

This aspect of gendering language would not be so bad if it was not so connected to the diminution and invisibility of femininity and women. In English, diminutives such as “-ess” can be added to distinguish women from men in many professions: actress, hostess, waitress. Words such as “businessmen” and “policemen” are associated with what you’d expect (and with what they say): men. The same is true for the use of the word “man” or “mankind” to describe our species, or “he” as putatively gender-neutral when writers describe an abstract person in the singular (e.g., “To each his own”). Despite what your grammar teachers might have told you, this kind of gendered writing sidelines women and threatens their sense of inclusion.

This gendered language usage can have bigger, nefarious outcomes. Countries whose populations use more gendered language have more gender inequality. On average, women relative to men have lower levels of educational attainment and less participation in the labor force in these countries compared to those that have less gendered language. This research is correlational, however, so it’s not clear whether gendered language is causing gender inequality, or if something else is leading to these relationships.

Experimental work by social psychologist Sabine Sczesny and colleagues is helping to build causal evidence for how gendered language affects our psychology. To give some examples. when job titles in German—a highly gendered language—were described to one sample using more gender-neutral language (think “firefighter” compared to “fireman”), people were less likely to unconsciously associate those jobs with men. When people were asked to name their favorite heroes or musicians in German using similarly gendered versus gender-neutral language, people were more likely to include women when the gender-neutral version of the description was used. At the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in San Diego earlier this month, Szczesny reported on a meta-analysis showing that effects like this have been found in nearly 100 studies across nine different languages.

Language, however, can change. If you find Shakespeare’s Hamlet hard to read, you will find Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—written only 200 years earlier—nearly impossible in its original. Language changes aren’t just about updating slang or adding useful words that emerge with technology, such as laptop or internet. Whole systems within language can change.

For example, most people are familiar with the fact that English Renaissance writing used to distinguish the formal (you) and the informal (thee, thou) in the same way that the French and Spanish continue to (vous and usted, versus tu). But English speakers don’t make that distinction any more. People might find it surprising to know that Old English also used to have grammatical gender (similar to un versus una/une), about a thousand years ago, but that too has since disappeared. Why grammatical gender disappeared in English is a matter of fascinating historical research that goes beyond this blog, although the change was almost certainly not due to some conscious mobilization of English speakers to fight gender inequality.

The point, though, is that gendered language can change, which raises questions as to whether it will change in a direction that is more gender neutral. Szczesny and colleagues are optimistic. Among German speakers, at least, those who use more gender-fair language have been evaluated more positively and—among women—seen as more competent, compared to those who do not. In English, too, there are positive signs as we see the practice of gendered diminutives, such as stewardess, being replaced by gender neutral terms, such as flight attendant. Such gender-fair language will undoubtedly bear on other gender-related language concerns such as pronoun usage, for those who do not identify so easily with the binary of men or women. Regardless, these kinds of changes may help dismantle many of the deeply ingrained systems of biases that contribute to gender inequalities in subtle and even hidden ways.