A roadmap to gender in language
Debates surrounding gender-neutral language have often hit the headlines in the past few years. It’s not only a question of how to address those around us properly: in the history of our society and our language, how we talk about and with gender is part of a complex environment. Embark on a journey with researchers from the NCCR Evolving Language and other Swiss institutions, who agreed to share their expertise on the topic.
by Celia Lazzarotto.
Gender and language are inextricably linked, in various ways. © Celia Lazzarotto
In 1887, the Swiss Federal Court stated that it would be wrong and unheard of to assume that “Schweizer Bürger” (Swiss citizen, masculine form) in the law could possibly include women. Today, however, many would argue the word “Bürger” is to be taken as gender-neutral and therefore including women. Others on the other hand request that this is made explicit, by using inclusive writing like “Bürger und Bürgerinnen“or “Bürger:innen“, to avoid any discrimination.
Gender and language are inextricably linked, in various ways. Together with experts from the fields of linguistics, psychology and neurolinguistics, we tried to disentangle this topic. Where does it come from? How does it impact us today? And most importantly, what can we do to lessen the negative consequences? Follow us on a journey to discover the origins, present, and future of gender in languages.
Road signs for the brain
In many languages, gender takes an unexpected place: it is mainly shown by an article, a word that accompanies a noun. Also called “grammatical gender”, it can separate nouns into feminine vs masculine, but also animate vs inanimate, locations vs things, vegetables vs tools, etc. Here, we’ll focus on the distinction between feminine and masculine and neutral. Sometimes, the choice of which category the word belongs to is not arbitrary, especially for those that denote people: here feminine and masculine often mirror the social gender (female and male). For example, the father is “der Vater” in German [masc.] and “le père” in French [masc.], and the mother is “die Mutter” in German [fem.] and “la mère” in French [fem.]. However, some are completely arbitrarily put into gender categories and have no relationship to social gender such as “der Steg” (the dock) in German is masculine and “die Brücke” (the bridge) is feminine, but in French “la passerelle” (the dock) is feminine and “le pont” (the bridge) is masculine.
Balthasar Bickel, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Zurich, notes that having gendered articles can facilitate the brain’s search processes. “Instead of looking through all known terms, articles allow it to sort the space and find the meaning of a specific word faster,” he says. This sorting system appears independently in languages and comes and goes with time. It is present in some form in about half of the world’s languages, half of which uses articles linked to gender (feminine, masculine, and sometimes neutral). Why gender was chosen as a separator is not well understood. It could be a reflection of the traditional differences and opposition between social genders. However, some languages like Turkish, whose culture separates strongly between women and men, do not have a notion of gender in their grammar. “Because there is no database comparing the use of grammatical gender and the cultural importance of social gender in societies over time, it is hard to investigate whether societies with stronger gender differences are more prone to develop and maintain gendered articles in their language,” reports Prof. Balthasar Bickel.
Patriarchy behind the wheel
For Alexis Hervais-Adelman, professor in Neurolinguistics at the University of Geneva, “gendering in the language is a manifestation of societal culture.” The lexical distinction of genders reflects how humans think about genders and how they want them to be expressed. In some languages, the way we speak is the result of years of masculinization, forced by patriarchal views. In French, heavy changes were made in the 17th century by L’Académie Française – a group of intellectuals in charge of monitoring the French language. To discourage women from pursuing certain careers and reaching positions of power, they suppressed the usage of existing words such as “une autrice” (female author) or “une médicine” (female physician). “From the 16th century, there was a progressive erasure of female authors – both linguistically and societally. In the 17th century, the word “autrice” was banned by the Académie Française. Two centuries later, in the 19th century, with school becoming compulsory and female authors being erased from public visibility, the term truly disappeared,” explains Pascal Gygax, researcher in psycholinguistics at the University of Fribourg (CH). The rule of “masculine wins over feminine” – meaning that agreement should be made to the masculine anytime gender was unknown, or a mix-gender group was referred to – also comes from this period.
Interestingly, lingering patriarchal views are also seen behind a lot of expressions and words still used nowadays without us even noticing. The expression “like a girl” often has a derogatory subtone or is even seen as an insult. To “throw like a girl” can imply an inferior physical performance and is commonly used to motivate someone to “do better”. Also, frequently used expressions, like “Husband and Wife” or “Adam and Eve”, tend to place the man in the first spot, in other words, as the most important of the duo.
The use of masculine as the neutral form of a job title, which is much more prevalent in languages using grammatical gender, tends to exclude women. © Celia Lazzarotto
A discriminating dead-end
Perception of gender roles is engraved in everyone from their education and the environment surrounding them. According to developmental psychologists, children are very sensitive to their surroundings and start to be conscious of what gender they are from the age of 2. The language and behaviors used towards them at this stage are highly likely to greatly impact their personality.
Languages that use the masculine grammatical form both as specific (to talk about the masculine gender) and as generic (to talk about something regardless of gender, or in cases of mix-gender groups), like French and German, can change children’s view of the world and influence them even through adulthood. According to Pascal Gygax, children from a very young age tend to associate masculine with a man or a boy, and not with a non-specific gender or with groups also composed of women or girls. And this acquisition is even earlier for girls, as they are addressed with feminine-specific terms, marking a difference between them and a masculine form that does not include them. “In turn, this could be a fuel for inequalities”, hypotheses Pascal Gygax.
In a study, primary school students were given job descriptions either in paired descriptions (e.g. “Would you like to be a male or female engineer?”) or in the generic masculine form (e.g. “Would you like to be an engineer?”). The results indicate that inclusive job titles generally increase the mental accessibility of female professionals, promote a more balanced perception of male and female success and increase girls’ interest in stereotypically male professions. This phenomenon does not only impact children and teenagers in their career choices, but also the job applications of adults.
Indeed, the use of masculine as the neutral form of a job title, which is much more prevalent in languages using grammatical gender, tends to exclude women: they do not feel concerned by the job because they see it mostly as a specific masculine form. “Efforts have been made to avoid the use of masculine-only terms in job offers, though it isn’t sufficient as rampant stereotypes also impact what women and men perceive as an acceptable and desired career”, explains Pascal Gygax. Also, it could reduce opportunities for men in jobs thought to be more feminine, such as carer, nurse, babysitter.
“Moreover, men and women are not judged equally for their work as we demonstrated in one of our studies,” says Pascal Gygax. In the long term, such a stereotype of reduced capability can hamper women’s careers. Other aspects are also impacted, such as the attribution of ideas. In his classes, Prof. Balthasar Bickel recalls that “it is common for students to assume that an author is a man when presenting an article”. Not giving women or other genders credit when due, participates in their erasure and the perpetuation of stereotypes.
On our way to inclusivity!
The goal of gender-neutral writing – also called inclusive language – is to erase the idea that masculinity is the norm and female the exception. Changing this in language could then affect the way we perceive the world, and lead to more equality between genders. There are many ways to make language gender-neutral, as described by Pascal Gygax and Prof. Sandrine Zufferey. Some do not require any ‘innovation’, meaning they do not invent new words or grammar rules while others do (e.g., to talk about a neutral third party, English can use the existing pronoun “they”, while French uses invented pronouns such as “iel”).
Is it an issue that words are invented to fit this inclusive language? Not according to the experts! “People feel like language is stable, but it is not!”, exclaims Pascal Gygax. An opinion shared by Prof. Balthasar Bickel. Language is supposed to serve living humans, so it is normal that it evolves to represent them better. “New words are constantly added to the vocabulary of a language. And the brain has no problem adapting to them”, Prof. Balthasar Bickel adds. He cites brand names as an example: they are artificially introduced words but are quickly adopted by the users. “If people feel that there is a need for a word, it will be used and spread”, he says.
However, it feels like this new type of language is adding more complexity to the way we communicate. But it’s nothing that nature doesn’t do on its own already, according to our expert in linguistics, Balthasar Bickel! Languages’ complexity varies over time, oscillating between changes that expand the language and changes that shorten it. “This phenomenon is extremely well-established in language evolution. And none of these changes make languages more efficient or easier to learn,” according to Prof. Balthasar Bickel. “There is no harm in using longer expressions to say something, as there is nothing wrong with using less”. Furthermore, studies (1, 2) seem to show that gender-neutral pronouns are not harder to process and to understand. Data on how children, people with dyslexia or another impairment related to language, and people from other social backgrounds process these terms would however be useful to have a more representative picture.
All in all, inclusive language seems like it would be a great tool, but could it actually improve gender equality in society? The case of the Swedish pronoun “hen”, a gender-neutral pronoun which emerged in the 1960s and was introduced to the Swedish dictionary in 2015, is interesting for researchers to evaluate the impact of gender-neutral language. According to Prof. Alexis Hervais-Adelman, “the introduction of the word is not useless, as studies show that using the gender-neutral pronoun “hen” seems to reduce male bias, while using paired he/she forms does not. However, this does not mean that stereotypes cease to exist, only that innovated neutral pronouns may not elicit them as strongly”. He wonders if novel forms in German and French could have the same efficiency as “hen” in reducing stereotypes.
The problem is usually not only the words but also the meaning behind them, thinks Prof. Balthasar Bickel, backed up by Pascal Gygax. “It is an assumption that it will have consequences if we change the language, but we have no strong evidence of that”, Prof. Alexis Hervais-Adelman says. “Though the “hen” example suggests that in the context of using an innovated neutral pronoun, biases can be reduced, we haven’t yet observed long-term consequences”, he notes. This means that changing the language won’t immediately change the culture. There are a lot of historical embeddings that will take time to remove. “We need to wait before drawing our conclusions ; it could be the case that language followed by society is slowly changing”, Pascal Gygax concludes. “It took 3 centuries for the word “autrice” to fully disappear, so it could take a while to reappear”.
Media Contact
Prof. Balthasar Bickel – Departement of Comparative Language Science, University of Zürich and Director of the NCCR Evolving Language.
Tel. +41 44 63 40220
Prof. Alexis Hervais-Adelman – Departement of Basic Neurosciences, University of Geneva.
Pascal Gygax – Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg
Tel. +41 26 300 76 40
