Language Affects How We Think About Gender
Our words shape our perceptions of gender in subtle but significant ways.
Given my fondness for sequins and unswerving determination to descend a staircase gracefully in six-inch stilettos, it might not come as a total shock that I am interested in gender. And language, another longstanding interest, informs how we think about it. When we speak in certain languages, like French or Spanish, we give a gender to each noun, so that I might say (to give you an example I have plucked out of thin air), ‘C’est ma tiare, chérie’ (‘That is my tiara, darling’) but ‘C’est mon trône’ (‘That is my throne’). Tiare is feminine; trône is masculine. What will seem to a native English-speaker to be a quirk of these and other languages in fact shapes the way a speaker of one of those languages thinks about objects, people and even abstract concepts, all the while shoring up certain gender stereotypes and gender roles.
Consider: a speaker of a gendered language will ascribe traits to an object based on the gender assigned to it. So when an Italian-speaker is asked to describe the sun (‘il sole’), she is more likely to talk about it using adjectives commonly bound up with masculinity. When asked to describe the moon (‘la luna’), in contrast, she is more likely to make use of adjectives connected to femininity. Lera Boroditsky, Lauren A. Schmidt, and Webb Phillips did a lovely little study on this. They found that Spanish speakers described the masculine noun ‘bridge’ (‘el puente’) with adjectives like ‘strong’ and ‘sturdy’; German speakers, for whom the word ‘bridge’ is feminine (‘die brücke’), used words like ‘elegant’ and ‘beautiful’ to describe exactly the same thing. Of course, it is possible that the average German bridge is simply more attractive than the average Spanish bridge; Germany does have a fine engineering tradition, after all.
Spanish speakers described the noun ‘bridge’ with adjectives like ‘strong’ and ‘sturdy’; German speakers used words like ‘elegant’ and ‘beautiful’.
It has been claimed that the repeated association made between certain qualities and masculinity or femininity shores up gender norms. This sounds possible. A country in which the main language spoken has grammatical gender is also less likely to be equal. Jennifer L. Prewitt-Freilino, T. Andrew Caswell and Emmi K. Laakso, who surveyed 111 countries, suggested this may be in part because it is easier to revise language to make it less gendered when it is not masculine or feminine to begin with. In English, we can use ‘spokesperson’ or ‘spokeswoman’ or (what used to be the default choice) ‘spokesman’. In French, le porte-parole is always masculine, and so solidifies the idea that spokespeople (with all the connotations of self-confidence and assertiveness that word evokes) are men.
But English, as that example shows, is not immune to having gendered words. Some of us will reflexively call a ‘police officer’ a ‘policeman’ or a ‘flight attendant’ an ‘air stewardess’. It may seem like pedantry to pore over the dictionary, fussily looking for words to be upset by, but there is some evidence that if a job title is gendered then it will inform how a child perceives his or her suitability for it. If you ask that child to draw a picture of whoever is doing the job in question, or simply to talk about that person, he or she will invariably sketch someone who matches the gender of the word.
One approach to stopping this sort of thing from happening, other than by changing the word entirely (eg, by changing ‘fireman’ to ‘firefighter’) is to excise the female suffix from the job titles that have one. This is why we now hear the word ‘actor’ used to describe both male and female performers. But—and I think this is a good point—all this really does, at least in the short term, is create the sense that the male version of the word is the norm. And here, we find an interesting parallel with something that post-liberal feminists say: female liberation in the second half of the 20th century has rested on an implicit belief that male behaviour is the default, and that women should be more like men, even though they are not men.
We now hear the word ‘actor’ used to describe both male and female performers.
So it seems language shapes how we think about gender in subtle but significant ways. It may strengthen social norms and inform our perceptions and expectations. Whether or not attempts to modify language as a means of bringing about social change are practical, necessary or desirable is for you to decide, dear reader. But for now, I will leave you with a lovely passage from Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which always springs to mind when I think about language and gender.
‘He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them.
