Gender neutrality in English

Non-sexist language (gender-generic, gender-inclusive, gender-neutral, or sex-neutral language) is language that attempts to refer neither to males nor females when discussing an abstract or hypothetical person whose sex cannot otherwise be determined, as opposed to sexist language, which attempts to refer to males. The goal is to keep the language as inoffensive as possible, similar to the idea of political correctness.

Examples

One might state, "Tomorrow I will meet my new doctor; I hope he is friendly."; however, unless one is certain that the new doctor is a man, advocates of non-sexist language generally argue that it would be better to state, "Tomorrow I will meet Dr. Smith, who I hope is friendly." (Critics would point out that this example is rather contrived, since non-defining relative clauses are extremely rare in everyday speech. The person in this example would be talking like a book.)

A business might advertise that it is looking for a new chair or chairperson, rather than a new chairman, thereby implying that only a man would be acceptable for this position. Some advocates of non-sexist language would see it as unobjectionable to refer to a man in such a position as a chairman, provided that a woman would be referred to by the equivalent term chairwoman. Others would claim, however, that the sex of the occupant of the chair is irrelevant and thus chairperson or chair are the only acceptable terms.

Likewise, if a woman states that she is dating someone; a system of non-sexist language might deem it inappropriate to ask her, "Who is he?"; rather, one should ask, "Whom are you dating?" to allow for the possibility that she might be dating a woman. Such language is an attempt to avoid heterosexism.

Common positions

Views among advocates of non-sexist language are spread over a wide range, from passionate argumentation in favour, to consistent use in their own speech and writing, to occasional use. However, most people simply decide for themselves whether or not to use it in their writing.

A great many people have no opinion on non-sexist language and make no special effort to avoid what advocates may describe as sexist language. However, many terms advocated or proposed by advocates of non-sexist language, such as Ms., firefighter, or he or she, have entered the common lexicon (in some cases, before advocacy of non-sexist language began), and may be used by those who do not have any particular feeling about the subject.

Still others regard non-sexist language as revisionist, as promoting poor or heavy writing, excessively "politically correct," or simply a cosmetic change that does nothing to actually repel sexism. They may consciously refuse to use forms of speech advocated by promoters of non-sexist language. See below.

History

Many of the modern masculine terms in Modern English in use today originated as gender neutral terms in Old English. For example, the word 'man' was originally gender neutral and qualified to specify male or female. While the male qualification died out, the female wíf (which produced woman) survived, leaving 'man' with both its original gender-neutral meaning (people), especially in compounds such as "mankind", and its gender-specific meaning, male.

Both Ancient Greek and Classical Latin show a similar process for anthropos and homo respectively. Both of these words mean "man in general" or "human being"; as in the modern "anthropology" or "homo sapiens. For "male human as opposed to female human", there exist the separate words aner and vir, from which we get "virile". The modern descendants of the Latin homo such as French homme, Italian uomo, Spanish hombre, Romanian om are specifically male.

It should be noted that the Latin root of "human" is not homo, but humus, earth, which carries a feminine grammatical gender.

Awareness of the social effects of language was largely a 20th century phenomenon in the English-speaking world, and has been linked to the development of the principle of linguistic relativity by Benjamin Whorf and others. However, a program to rid Norwegian of sexist presuppositions dates from the mid 19th century and remains an ongoing part of Norwegian culture.

Add later history here

Disputed issues

There are a wide range of disputed issues in the debate over 'non-sexist language'. Are there inherently sexist language forms, and if so, what are they? If they exist, should they be changed? If they should be changed, how should this be achieved?

Are some uses of language inherently sexist?

Advocates of 'non-sexist language', including many feminists, argue that traditional language fails to reflect the presence of women in society adequately. In general, they complain about a number of issues:

Over-use of what they consider to be exclusively gender-specific pronouns like "he".
Use of "man" to refer to all people.
Over-use of gender-specific job titles.
Use of Miss and Mrs. (see Ms.).
non-parallel usage, such as "man and wife".
Stereotypical words such as virile and ladylike

Advocates of 'non-sexist language' see various problems with these uses:

They marginalize women and create the impression of a male-dominated society.
They can be patronising, for example treating women only as marriage material
They can perpetuate stereotypes about the "correct" way for a man or woman to behave.

Opponents of non-sexist language do not accept these arguments as valid.

Some regard the whole thing as "political correctness gone mad".
Some people believe that while these usages may, on the surface, appear gender-biased, in practice most people think of them and use them as gender-neutral.
Some people disagree with feminism and argue that men and women differ enough that these differences are rightly embedded in the language. In this context, see masculism.
Grammatically speaking, "he" and its derivatives are often used for gender-neutral purposes.

A deeper variant of these arguments involves the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the suggestion that our language shapes our thought processes and that in order to eliminate sexism we would do well to eliminate "sexist" forms from our language. Some people dismiss the effectiveness of such a suggestion, viewing 'non-sexist language' as irrelevant window-dressing which merely hides sexist attitudes rather than changing them.

Enforcement, persuasion, or evolution?

A tiny minority of advocates for non-sexist language argue that these "sexist" usages should be banned. It is unclear how this would be achieved. Hate speech legislation does exist in some countries, but applies to much more clear-cut and widely accepted cases of perceived prejudice. Many editing houses, corporations, and government bodies have official policies in favour of in-house use of non-sexist language. In some cases, laws exist regarding the use of non-sexist language in certain situations, such as job advertisements.

The majority of advocates for 'non-sexist language' wish to proceed by persuasion rather than enforcement. One tool of this persuasion is creating guidelines (see below) that indicate how they believe language should be used. Another tool is simply to make use of 'non-sexist language' oneself, and lead by example.

In addition to those who oppose any change, some opponents of 'non-sexist language' argue that a change in language should evolve organically from changing public attitudes towards gender issues, rather than be achieved either by enforcement, or by persuasion.

Neologising

While some terms, such as firefighter and singular they, are sometimes denigrated by opponents as neologisms, they in fact have a long history that predates the beginning of the women's liberation movement. At other times new terms have indeed been created, such as Ms. or Womyn. The issue is confused by satirists who invent extreme examples of the supposed consequences of 'non-sexist language', such as epersoncipation.

Some critics accuse advocates of non-sexist language of "re-gendering" language, replacing masculine in some cases by feminine terms that are equally sexist. Other critics argue that some phrases used in non-sexist language violate the rules of proper grammar and style.

Some critics claim that words like "he or she" are not real English words, for they only exist in print, not in speech. In print it is easy for an editor to employ rules of non-sexist language, but speech is practically impossible to control. People simply don't use words like "he or she" in their everyday speech; instead they use "they" or "he". Only the most determined reformer would actually use "he or she" in a casual conversation, since it would sound stilted and affected to many people.

Many linguists see words like he or she as a solution to a non-existent problem. Most English speakers happily use the singular they without thinking twice, but reformers still insist that it is a grammatical error. Nonetheless, the case for the singular they is quite compelling from a linguistic point of view. It has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages, and it was even used by the greatest English authors including Shakespeare and Chaucer. In light of this, many newer style guides are beginning to accept the singular they as grammatically correct.

Guidelines

Many different authorities have presented guidelines on whether, and if so and where, to use 'non-sexist language'. Wikipedia is not a style guide, so we present a selection of such sources here.

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association has an oft-cited section on "Guidelines to Reduce Bias in Language". ISBN 1557987912
American Philosophical Association - published 1986
Linguistic Society of America
University of Western Sydney - last revised 1995
University of New Hampshire
The Guardian - see section gender issues
Avoiding Heterosexual Bias in Language, published by the Committee on Lesbian and Gay Concern, American Psychological Association.

...

Many dictionaries, stylebooks, and some authoritative guides now counsel the writer to follow the new guidelines.

These guidelines, though accepted by many, remain in some contexts controversial, and are applied to differing degrees among English speakers worldwide. often reflecting different cultures and language structure, for example American English in contrast to British English. They are also impacted upon, depending on whether a person uses English as their first language or as a second language, regional variants or whether their form of English is based on grammatical structures inherited from a no longer widely used other language (for example, Hiberno-English) or owes its linguistic structure to earlier Old English or Elizabethan English. In these cases, language structure from their native tongue or linguistic inheritance may enter into their terminology.

Non-sexist language in other languages

The situation of 'non-sexist' usage is very different in languages that have masculine and feminine grammatical gender, such as French, German, and Spanish, simply because it is impossible to construct a gender-neutral sentence the way it can be done in English. For example, in French, the masculine gender supersedes the feminine; la femme et l'homme (the woman and the man) has the pronoun ils (they-masculine).

Accordingly, most of the focus has been on more concrete problems such as job titles. Due to the presence of grammatical gender, the strategy is the exact opposite of that of English: creating feminine job titles rather than eliminating them. This is based on the idea that it is insulting to call a woman (for example) le médecin (the (masculine) doctor), as if she changed sex or became somehow more mannish when she went to work.

Esperanto

Esperanto is accused of being inherently sexist, because the generic form of nouns is the same as the male form and different from the female form. E.g., doktoro = "doctor (male or unspecified sex)", doktorino = "female doctor"; also doktoroj = "doctors (male, mixed male/female, or unspecified sex)", doktorinoj = "female doctors". (This use of -in to form the feminine of nouns is reminiscent of German, e.g. Maler, Malerin = "painter".) Likewise for pronouns: as in English, li ("he") may be generic, whereas ŝi ("she") is always female.

To some critics, this aspect of the language makes the implication that masculinity is some kind of default, and femininity is an exception. The feature is particularly irksome to English speakers, since the corresponding suffix -ess is much less used in that language.

Defenders reply that this asymmetric treatment of male and female is not a feature of Esperanto, but only a general feature of most European languages. In each Romance language, for instance, grammatical genders are assigned to all nouns — even to unsexed objects, or in opposition the biological sex (as autorité = "authority" in French, guardia = "policeman" in Italian, and virilidad = "masculinity" in Spanish, which all have feminine gender). In fact, given the arbitrary assignment of grammatical gender, Romance and German speakers generally do not make the sexist assumptions claimed by the critics. Viewed in this broader context, argue the Esperantists, "sexist language" is shown to be a matter of cultural assumptions and interpretations by the speakers, not of the language per se.

Moreover, since Esperanto does not inflect adjectives for gender (as most of those languages do) it is in fact an "unsexed" (technically, gender-less) language. Indeed, it has become acceptable in Esperanto to use doktoro even to refer to a female doctor, a custom that is compatible with the standard grammar. Thus doktorino only needs to be used to emphasize femaleness; and some have even proposed the use of virdoktoro (literally "male-doctor") when one wants to emphasize maleness. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, one can use the neutral tiu ("that one") instead. The alternative ŝ/li is also used, but it has the same problems as "s/he" in English, though it is easier pronounceable. Some users also use neologisms such as ri as a gender-neutral pronoun.

Ido, a constructed languaged that is heavily based on Esperanto but seeks to avoid its shortfalls, does not have this asymmetric gender-marking system. Instead, nouns in Ido for kinds of people are gender-neutral in their ordinary form, but may be made either female- or male-specific using a suffix. Examples: sekretario, secretary --- sekretariulo, man secretary --- sekretariino, woman secretary;

doktoro, doctor --- doktorulo, man doctor --- doktorino, woman doctor.

Chinese

It is interesting that despite a history of male dominance comparable to or exceeding the level of most other cultures, the Chinese language escapes many of the gender-neutral problems affecting other languages due to its underlying structure. First of all, comprehension in Chinese is wholly dependent on word order; as Chinese is virtually a monosyllabic language, no inflexion, pre- or suffixes of any kind are possible. Devoid of such inflection, all Chinese words are thus inherently gender-neutral. For example, the word for 'doctor' is "yi sheng" (醫生) can only be made gender-specfic by adding the word for "male" or "female" in front of it. Thus to specify a male doctor, one would need to say nán yi sheng" (男醫生). This particular construction would admittedly be rarely due to the stereotypical perception in Chinese society that doctors tend to be male, but that is not a feature of the language itself. Under normal circumstances both male and female doctors would be simply refered to as "yi sheng".

In stark contrast to the large tables of pronouns in many European languages, Chinese has really only one third-person pronoun, "ta" (他) for all situations. "Ta" can mean he, she, or it in any case or tense (neither concept actually exist in Chinese). However, in recent years, perhaps due to influence from English, there has been a tendancy to in written language to use a female-only form of the pronoun "ta", written (她) with the radical for 'female', but pronounced the same as the neutral "ta" in speech. There are those in the Chinese community who find this development to be absurd, in a sense "asking for trouble" where there previously was none.

Finnish

Finnish has only gender-neutral pronouns (it totally lacks grammatical gender). The word "hän" is completely gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". Suffix "-tar" or "-tär" can be added to some words (mostly professions) to "feminize" the word, for example näyttelijä (actor) - näyttelijätär (actress), but this is fairly uncommon. Also you can always use the basic word for both genders (näyttelijä for male and female actors).

It has been argued that Finland has been a pioneer in women right issues because it has no gender-specific pronouns: for example, it was the first European country to give women the right to vote. However, international studies show that Finns are not any more unprejudiced than users of any other language.

French

See also the French version of this article

In French, feminine job titles are created by adding -e (l'avocate), -eure (la docteure), -euse (la travailleuse), -esse (la mairesse), or nothing in some cases such as -iste or -logue (la psychologue). More generally, "non-sexist" styles can include the use of brackets or capital letters to insert feminine endings (étudiant(e)s or étudiantEs) or repeat gendered words (toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens).

Words that formerly referred to a dignitary's wife (l'ambassadrice) can be used to refer to a woman in that position; this, like other "non-sexist" forms, is much more common in Quebec than in France. Although the marriage titles have mainly dropped out of use, many cite the possible confusion as a reason for continuing to use such as Madame le Président or Madame l'ambassadeur. For this reason, these remain the most frequent, at least in France. (On the other hand, an ambassador's husband would not be Monsieur l'ambassadrice.)

German

In German, creating a feminine job title is usually done by adding -in to the word in question. For example, the general term for computer scientist is Informatiker. The male form is unchanged: Informatiker. The female form, however, is distinguished by adding -in, giving Informatikerin.

Job descriptions in job adverts are usually formulated addressing both sexes (Informatiker oder Informatikerin). Sometimes a form of contraction with capitalization inside the word is used ("InformatikerIn"), which is considered by some people as a corruption of the language, especially if it is overdone by creating feminine forms of gender neutral words (for example a German feminist who called a group of non-feminist women Arschlöcherinnen - female assholes). The use of slashes is commonplace, too, such as in Informatiker/in.

German has three third person nominative singular pronouns: er (male), sie (female), and man (either). Man is frequently used in general statements, e.g. Man kann nicht hier parken - "One cannot park here." This pronoun man is distinguished from the noun Mann (capitalized and with two n's), which means "male adult human".

German has distinguished forms of pronouns for her and him. The use of pronouns is non-discriminatory since it distinguishes both sexes in a consistent manner rather than marking only the feminine as is done with job titles.

The traditional phraseology of the language reflects a domination of the male over the female, as in many other languages. There are fixed phrases where the male form comes first, such as man and woman (Mann und Frau). The use of Fräulein to address young women is very uncommon these days, but it lacks a male counterpart.

External link

The Swiss weekly newspaper WOZ - Die Wochenzeitung edits all published articles to non-sexist language.

Hebrew

In Hebrew, which has a high degree of grammatical gender, virtually every noun (as well as pronoun of second and third degree) is attributed as either masculine or feminine. Therefore, there are laws constituted in Israel that require job ads to be written in a non-sexist form, often with a separator '/' (e.g. "dru'shim/ot", "maz'kir/a") to explicitly proclaim that the job is offered for both males and females equally.

Hungarian

Hungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns and lacks grammatical gender: referring to a gender needs explicit statement of "the man" (he) or "the woman" (she). "Ő" means "he/she" and "ők" means "they". Hungarian distinguishes persons and things, as you refer to things as "az" (it) or "azok" (those).

Italian

In Italian feminine job titles are easily formed (-a, -essa and other suffixes) but often they are perceived as ridiculous neologisms. Italian job announcements often use a specific expected gender ("segretaria", "meccanico") or they address both sexes with a slash ("candidato/a"). Many adjectives have identical feminine and masculine forms, so they are effectively gender-neutral when used without articles as job titles ("dirigente", "responsabile di ...") and in many other contexts; slashes are often applied to articles ("il/la cliente", the customer). There are full sets of masculine and feminine pronouns and articles (with some coincidences) and some vestiges of neuter; adjectives are declined, even if many remain the same, and adjective declination is also used in the many verbal tenses involving the past participle. The masculine gender is the default for isolated adjectives and pronouns, for mixed-gender aggregates and for generic usage.

Japanese

Japanese has gender specific pronouns, but not grammatical gender. Thus, isha can mean one or many male doctors, one or many female doctors, or many male and female doctors. Pronouns are generally avoided unless the meaning is unclear. On the other hand, when referring to "them" the male plural pronoun (they [masculine]) karera is usually used in preference to the rather awkward sounding kanojo-tachi (they [feminine]). This can be avoided by using the gender neutral, grammatical and natural-sounding "those people" (ano hito-tachi).

Korean

Korean, like a few other East Asian languages such as Japanese, does not use pronouns in everyday language, because the meaning is clear in the context. In case of confusion, there are pronouns to clarify the position, but normally the actual subject (person) is used rather than the pronoun. As for job titles, these are not gender-specific. Again, the meaning is normally clear in the context.

Spanish

In Spanish, it is usually quite easy to change an -o to an -a, or to add an -a to an ending such as -or (el doctor, la doctora). Other endings can be left alone or changed (la estudiante but la alcaldesa). -ista is left alone. (One problem is el policía, "police officer", since la policía means "the police force". The only useful feminine term is la mujer policía). A fashion current in Spain is to use the at sign (@) to replace -o or -a, especially in political writing (¡Ciudadan@s!), but it is more common to use the slash (/) as in (el/la candidato/a). (See also Alternative political spellings).

Some politicians seek to avoid sexism in their speeches, so they may repeat the gendered words ("ciudadanos y ciudadanas"). This way of speaking is subject to parodies where new words ending in -a are created for the sole purpose of accompanying the corresponding masculine word, even if it is neuter and can be applied to both genders (like felizas and probably estudiantas in "los y las estudiantes y estudiantas felices y felizas").

Spanish words have grammatical gender and the endings have nothing or little to do with the sex of the person.

Words ending in -o may refer to either a man or a woman: testigo

Words ending in -a may refer to either a man or a woman as well: dentista, ciclista, especialista,

Some words ending in -a refer only to men: cura (that is, priest, a word which always ends in -a for a profession so far held only by men)

Some have an ending for the feminine and another for the masculine: cirujano, cirujana, escribano, escribana, maestro, maestra

We do have gender inclussive words in Spanish. They were there long before we even talked about sexism in the language:

representante, comerciante, estudiante, presidente

There have been several women presidents in Latinamerica. In Spanish there is no need to modify the word "presidente" nor add or clarify that it refers to a woman, as in English, since the Spanish word already has a common gender ending: -e. Only those who believe that a "president" is always a man may feel that they have to add the unnecesary -a to "presidenta". But why if it is already a gender inclusive word?

Feminine or masculine words have "grammatical gender" and may end in many other ways.

-or, -er, -dre -y, -ero, -era, etc. Note that "madre" and "padre" have the same ending but they refer to different sexes, another proof that endings do not connote sex all the time in Spanish.

Linguistically, it is incorrect to say or believe that feminine words end in -a and masculine words end in -o in Spanish.

For example, a female witness would not be referred to as "la testiga", nor would a male cyclist be referred to as "el ciclisto".

As to forms such as: Los/las niños/niñas van de paseo (not recommended) In oral language we solve the problem in a more logical way: Los niños y las niñas van de paseo. In some situations is also gender inclusive to say: Los niños van de paseo (since -os is a common gender or gender inclusive ending).

Tamil

Tamil has a gender-neutral form for the third-person plural, which is also used for the third-person singular in all formal communication. Most job titles are derived from this form as they are mostly used in a formal context. They are thus gender-free.

Turkish

Turkish is a gender neutral language, as most other Turkic languages. Nouns are in generic form and for both males and females and this generic form is used. For example: Doktor (doctor), eczacı (pharmacist), mühendis (engineer) etc.

The Turkish equivalent for he, she and it is O. For example:

O, gece yürümeyi çok seviyor. (He/she/it likes walking at night)
Onu çok seviyorum. (I love him/her/it so much)

There are a few exceptions, where it is mandatory to provide gender (because of the nature of the foreign word origins):

İş + Adam + ı = İşadamı (Business + Man = Businessman)
İş + Kadın + ı = İşadamı (Business + Woman = Businesswoman)

There are very minor exceptions, which are constructed from native Turkish words after 1900s:

Bilim + Adam + ı = Bilimadamı (Science + Man = Scientist)
Bilim + Kadın + ı = Bilimadamı (Science + Woman = Scientist)

Russian

Though Russian intrinsically shares many of the same problems concerning gender-neutral words with English and other languages -- for instance, usage of male-specific words for some occupations -- this has not been viewed as a problem, even in the recent years. Almost all women, even those who consider themselves feminists, do not object to what could be perceived as gender-specific language. Constructs like "he or she", though grammatically correct, are unheard of, and changing the occupation name into a gender-neutral form is virtually impossible (some occupations have the same word for either male or female form, while those that do not (i.e., male секретарь vs. female секретарша (secretary) also do not have a grammatically correct gender-neutral form, apart from an awkard construct such as "тот, кто выполняет секретарскую работу" / "the one who is engaged in secretary work").

Russian does have intrinsically gender-neutral words; when these exist, they are always used in place of gender-specific ones (for example, человек / human as opposed to мужчина / man and женщина / woman). Otherwise, a male form is used as an equivalent for gender-neutral form with no practical problems.