Language as a tool to shape how we think of gender

To combat gender stereotypes, we need to look closely at the language that we use. This might sound obvious. But recent work is revealing just how language can promote these stereotypes (even inadvertently) – and how it can counteract them.

Despite efforts to avoid gender stereotyping in many schools, children are exposed to them from a young age. They're found in everything from TV commercials to Halloween costumes. They're even embedded in popular magazines aimed at 2-9 year-olds in the UK, according to research published last year. Lauren Spinner at the University of Kent and her colleagues found that magazines aimed at girls were more likely to feature items on fashion and the home and less likely to feature items on jobs than boys' magazines. 

But it wasn't just the themes that differed. Girls' magazines were more likely to instruct the reader to ask for an adult's help with an activity. This difference in the choice of language suggests, of course, that girls are more likely to need assistance from an authority figure.

Well-meaning parents and teachers might try to combat these kinds of messages with statements such as 'girls are just as able as boys'. But, according to work published in 2021, this could easily backfire. Eleanor Chestnut at Stanford University and colleagues found that when children aged 7–11 were told that 'girls are as good as boys' at whistling, for instance, or hopping on one foot (activities that the team didn't expect children to have a strong pre-existing gender bias about) they inferred that boys were naturally better – and that girls would have to work harder to equal them. 

However, when the gender order was reversed, so that the 'girls' was taken as being the reference point to which 'boys' were being compared, they were more likely to report that girls were naturally better. So: the position of the gender term in the sentence mattered. The team did find a linguistic form that avoided the unintentional creation or reinforcement of gender stereotypes, though: when children were told that 'girls are "equally good as" boys' (or vice versa), they didn't view either gender as being naturally superior. Other research on children has found that generic language used to describe groups can perpetuate stereotypes. 

For example, 'boys like to play football' can lead children to conclude that all boys play football or that liking football is intrinsic to being a boy. In 2021, a team at New York University published work showing that these kinds of statements even lead children to make assumptions about other groups that aren't mentioned – to infer, for example, that girls don't like to play football.

The language of love and more

Language choices can also perpetuate stereotypes about men and women. A 2021 analysis of millions of words from books, film and TV, for example, found that gender stereotypes of women being associated with the home and men with work, for example, are still widespread. Studies have also found that women in the workplace are more likely to be described as 'helpful' or 'compassionate' (terms that match existing stereotypes) rather than as 'efficient'.

There are even gender differences in the way we refer to professional people – and the repercussions could be significant. Stav Atir at Cornell University studies how the language we use about people in the workplace influences perceptions of them. He led a study, published in PNAS in 2018, which found that both men and women are more likely to refer to a male vs a female professional using their surname, rather than their first name. Crucially, the team also found that people referred to by their surname are judged to be more eminent. This work suggests that even this simple linguistic choice could help to perpetuate female under-representation in high-status fields, including science, technology, engineering and maths.

When it comes to overcoming gender stereotypes through language, some languages do have bigger obstacles than others. While English does not have gendered nouns ('the ball' is not masculine or feminine, for instance), many other languages, including French, German, Russian and Hindi, do. Research published in 2020 showed that gender prejudice is more common in languages with grammatical genders. David DeFranza and colleagues at the University of Utah analysed vast amounts of text and found that, in gendered languages, positive words (like "lucky" or "love") occurred more often alongside male words (like "he" or "man") than female words (like "she" or "woman"). The same wasn't true of languages without grammatical genders.

A tool for change

But while language can reflect and reinforce existing stereotypes, it can also be used as a tool for change, argue Magdalena Formanowicz at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw and Karolina Hansen at the University of Warsaw in a recent paper. The pair discuss various strategies for adopting 'gender-fair language' (sometimes called 'gender-neutral language').

For instance, they highlight the need to avoid comparing women with men (with 'men' as the reference point in a sentence) because this can lead adults to infer that men are the 'gold standard', just like the children who were told that 'girls are as good as boys'. For example, researchers have found that the question: 'Do women lead differently to men?' (as compared to "Do men lead differently to women?") leads people to feel that male leaders have a higher status, and are more powerful than female leaders.

Adopting gender-fair language also entails removing any suggestion of gender from a job or role. This is something that is easier to do in English than in German, say, in which gender is always built-in (for example, a male accountant is 'der Buchhalter', while a female accountant is 'die Buchhalterin'). In English, many job roles (such as accountant, doctor, teacher, pilot, etc) are already gender-neutral, and 'policeman' has become 'police officer', 'air hostess' has become 'flight attendant', and so on (and the pronouns 'he' and 'she' can be replaced with 'they'). However, according to Stav Atir, this isn't always the most helpful way to combat gender stereotypes.

'Emerging research points to the power of language to shape how we think of gender in the professional domain,' Atir notes in a recent commentary in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. But while language can eliminate explicit gender – through the use of 'police officer' instead of 'policeman', say – that doesn't necessarily mean that 'police officer' leads the listener or reader to be equally likely to picture a woman or a man. 

Many gender-neutral terms are still viewed through the lens of traditional gender stereotypes, Atir writes. So, 'surgeon', though it's a gender-neutral term, will tend to conjure up the image of a man, while 'nurse' will tend to make people think of a woman, he argues. How can this be addressed? More women becoming surgeons and men becoming nurses would clearly help. But Atir also has a language-based recommendation.

Alongside gender-neutral terms, he advocates the judicious use of 'gender-marking': highlighting a person's gender when they have become successful in a field traditionally dominated by another gender (for example, when a woman achieves a high-ranking role in the military; in the UK, it was only in 2018 that all roles in the military were made open to women.) He argues that over time, this will help to change the stereotype that the term is associated with one gender.

However, this should be reserved for rare instances of a woman succeeding in a traditionally male-dominated field, and vice versa, or it could inadvertently make that field appear to be more gender-skewed than it is. Indeed, 'each strategy has the potential to combat gender bias, but also to enforce it,' he acknowledges. The answer? To take care – to try to tailor the language you use to your specific goal.

If this all sounds like a minefield, it's one that Atir, for one, thinks is well worth trying to navigate. Language is a tool for social change, he stresses – but unlike a magazine, say, or a TV commercial, it's one that we can all use. 

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Editor
Dr Matthew Warren

Writers
Emily Reynolds and Emma Young