Exploring the factors that influence speakers’ adoption or rejection of gender-inclusive pronouns

Supervisors: Dr Sarah Wright & Dr Cora Sargeant

Abstract

Factors that inform attitudes towards gender diverse individuals have been used to look more specifically at people's behaviour and decisions around inclusive pronoun use, to explore what strategies they use to refer to individuals of unknown gender and the complexity of the intersection of linguistic and social factors (Breccia, 2021).

It is hoped that this will provide greater understanding of factors that influence people's inclusive language, such that it might prompt reflection, from those that work with gender diverse individuals, to better consider how they might refer to them, and ensure that these individuals' need for belonging, coherence, and validation are met (Bosson et al., 2012; McLemore, 2014). 

The use of the pronoun 'they' in a generic-reference context has been widely researched and is well established and accepted in English (Sheydaei, 2021; Breccia, 2021). However, 'they' used to refer to a specific individual of unknown or non-binary gender is currently less acceptable and not widely in use (Renstrom et al. 2021; Bradley et al. 2019).

This study will experimentally examine gender-inclusive or exclusive pronoun use in a specific-reference context. It will explore the impact of gender beliefs among other known predictor variables (age, ethnicity, self-identified gender, gender essentialism, prejudice, religious fundamentalism, need for closure, discomfort with violations of gender heteronormativity, gender identity strength and political ideology), on linguistic behaviour. Participants (n=130) aged 16+ were asked to complete an anonymous online survey, including a vignette and production task, to see what strategies they use to refer to an individual of unknown gender, with the data analysed using a binary logistic regression.

Prior research from the USA has highlighted that only 20% of participants (n=198) used 'they' in a specific-reference context within a similar production task (Sheydaei, 2021). It is expected that within this study, and perhaps due to the increased visibility and support and societal awareness around issues regarding gender, that a larger percentage of participants will use 'they' to deal with the ambiguity of the individual's gender. 

The systematic review will explore this question - How do gender diverse individuals foster their resilience through activism? The literature search has elicited a mixed sample of papers, so the review will use a narrative synthesis framework.