Nothing Outside of the Text

51 “If you want to know why low percentages of women lead LANGUAGE, POLITICS, SEXISM corporations and populate STEM fields, look no further than the words coming out of our mouths.” Arianne Cohen The verb \"to be\" and its conjugations; These are the most gender-biased Être (to be) languages in the Je suis (I am) world (hint: English Tu es (You are) has a problem) Il/elle est (he/she is) Nous sommes (we are) Vous êtes (you(plural) are) ils/elles sont (they are) “Remember class, If you use “ils/elles sont” you must use the masculine “ils sont” when describing a group with both male and females — even if the group has a thousand females and one male, it is still “ils sont.” “What about a million?” “It will always be in the masculine form. It doesn’t matter how many females you have, if one male is present, the noun uses the masculine form.” This was one of the first rules I learned in French, and though I didn’t think it was fair, I didn’t think much of it at the time. “It’s just the way French was,” we were told. Pulling from history, we see how these rules manifested: 11-07-2017 “Because the masculine gender is the noblest, it prevails alone against two or more feminine ones, although they are closer. of Nous n'enseignerons plus their adjective.” (Dupleix, Liberté de la langue françoise, 1651); que le masculin l'emporte sur le féminin “The masculine is considered more noble than the feminine because of the superiority of the male over the female.” We will no longer teach (Beauzée, Grammaire générale, 1767). that the masculine prevails over the feminine — declared the grammar books. The rule had a much less Slate.fr linguistic reason of being than a political one. When language itself is riddled with such bias, can it ever be possible for language to hold an objective truth? Most of us would like to think that we do not engage in politics, sexism and stereotypes, but is that possible when the words we use contain political objectives? When it is ingrained in our grammatical structures?

52 Gender is perhaps one of the most prevalent biases within many languages, often which assume the ‘man’ as the position of the neutral and the ‘woman’ as the ‘other.’ Patriarchal society has designed our mode of communication to embed misogyny and make the implicit bias feel normal or natural. French is not the only language with biases that uphold patriarchal dominance. Here is a list of “the most gender-biased languages in the world” from a study conducted by Molly Lewis and Gary Lupyan (Seen at right). From an article published by Carnegie Mellon University, Molly Lewis and Gary Lupyan are quoted speaking about the findings themselves: 08-17-2020 \"Young children have strong gender stereotypes as do older adults, and the question is where do these biases come from,” Language May Undermine said Lewis, first author on the study. “No one has looked at Women in Science and Tech implicit language — simple language that co-occurs over Stacy Kish a large body of text — that could give information about stereotypical norms in our culture across different languages.\" *Lewis notes that the Implicit \"What's not obvious is that a lot of information that is contained Association Test used in this study has in language, including information about cultural stereotypes, been criticized for low reliability and [occurs not as] direct statements but in large-scale statistical limited external validity. She stresses relationships between words,\" said Lupyan, senior author on that additional work using longitudinal the study. \"Even without encountering direct statements, it analyses and experimental designs is is possible to learn that there is stereotype embedded in the necessary to explore language statistics language of women being better at some things and men and implicit associations with gender at others.\" stereotypes. They found that languages with a stronger embedded gender association are more clearly associated with career stereotypes. They also found that a positive relationship between gender-marked occupation terms and the strength of these gender stereotypes. Previous work has shown that children begin to ingrain gender stereotypes in their culture by the age of two. The team examined statistics regarding gender associations embedded in 25 languages and related the results to an international dataset of gender bias (Implicit Association Test). Surprisingly, they found that the median age of the country influences the study results. Countries with a larger older population have a stronger bias in career-gender associations.

53 https://www.fastcompany.com/90537064/these-are-the-most-gender-biased-langua... LANGUAGE, POLITICS, SEXISM 08-06-2020 These are the most gender-biased languages in the world (hint: English has a problem) Arianne Cohen A fascinating new study from Carnegie Mellon looks at the male-career bias in 25 languages across 39 countries, and finds that languages that heavily associate men with careers and women with family also have speakers who live out those biases. “If you speak a language that is really biased, then you are more likely to have a gender stereotype,” says the study’s lead author, cognitive scientist Molly Lewis, a special faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University. Here are the languages, listed from most male-career biased to least: (1) Danish (11) Portuguese (21) Croatian (2) German (12) Hindi (22) Turkish (3) Norwegian (13) Italian (23) Filipino (4) Dutch (14) Finnish (24) Polish (5) Romanian (15) French (25) Malay (6) English (16) Korean (7) Hebrew (17) Spanish (8) Swedish (18) Indonesian (9) Mandarin (19) Arabic (10) Persian (20) Japanese The researchers looked at the statistical relationship of words to each other, finding that in many languages, for example, “man” often occurs near “work,” “career,” and “business.” They also found that gender associations are heightened in languages that have gendered occupations, such as “steward” and “stewardess.” The results indicate that languages’ gender associations may partially shape (rather than reflect) people’s implicit gender biases. Pivotally, the researchers discovered that countries with high male-career gender bias also have low percentages of women in STEM fields, and fewer female students in STEM higher education. The implications are profound: This may partially explain where some early stereotypes about gender and work come from. Children as young as 2 exercise these biases, which cannot be explained by kids’ lived experiences (such as their own parents’ jobs, or seeing, say, many female nurses). The results could also be useful in combating algorithmic bias. The researchers hope to further confirm the relationship between implicit biases and word distribution using other study designs.

54 \"The consequences of these results are pretty profound,\" said Lewis. \"The results suggest that if you speak a language 09-21-2012 that is really biased then you are more likely to have a Masculine or Feminine? gender stereotype that associates men with career and women (And Why It Matters) with family.\" Steven B. Jackson She suggests children's books be written and designed to Salginatobelbrücke not have gender-biased statistics. These results also have Robert Maillart implications for algorithmic fairness research aimed at 1929 eliminating gender bias in computer algorithms. Ponte da Vila Formosa 1 Century CE \"Our study shows that language statistics predict people's implicit biases — languages with greater gender biases tend to have speakers with greater gender biases,\" Lupyan said. \"The results are correlational, but that the relationship persists under various controls [and] does suggest a causal influence.\" Another interesting study done by Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Philips looked at how languages with masculine and feminine pronouns shaped how participants viewed inanimate objects: “Can grammatical gender influence speakers’ cognitive processes when they’re speaking another language entirely? In 2002, researchers set out to answer that question. They created a list of 24 objects that have opposite genders in Spanish and German; in each language, half of the objects were masculine and half were feminine. Speaking English and using materials written in English, the researchers asked a group of native Spanish speakers and a group of native German speakers —all of whom were proficient in English— to generate three adjectives for each item on the list. Across the board, object gender influenced the participants’ judgments. For example, the word “key” is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers in the study tended to describe keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, used words such as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and tiny when describing keys. The word “bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering. In the same study, German and Spanish speakers looked at picture pairs. Each pair included a picture of a person and a

55LANGUAGE, POLITICS, SEXISM 11-16-2017 picture of an object. The participants rated how similar the two pictures were. There were no written labels, and participants Toppling the Grammar did not speak during the task. Both Spanish and German Patriarchy speakers judged pairs to be more similar when the grammatical Carmel McCoubrey gender of the object matched the biological sex of the person in the picture. A pair consisting of a bridge and a man, for example, seemed quite similar to a Spanish speaker but not similar at all to a German speaker.” If language can influence whether we understand bridges as either fragile and pretty or sturdy and strong, then we are far from the post-sexist world we would like to imagine ourselves to be in. Perhaps, it is the language itself, which is influenced by and continues to perpetuate patriarchal politics, that is holding us back. Perhaps we need to re-evaluate the language we use even more than we thought; but it’s not as easy as just saying it. There is no clear solution yet as the work remains to be unpacked. “That line (page 33), from a 1767 grammar book, was cited this month in a declaration signed by 314 teachers in France that they would no longer teach the rule that “the masculine prevails over the feminine” when it came to plural nouns. The teachers’ objection was not just philosophical; it was philological. The rule, they said in the French version of Slate, was a parvenu (it was enunciated in the 17th century and became widely taught only in the 19th century) and politically motivated (it buttressed French laws that denied women equal rights). Besides that, they said, the rule encourages children “to accept the domination of one sex over the other” to the detriment of women. In its place, the teachers suggested using “the rule of proximity,” in which the adjective matches the gender of the noun closest to it, which was common practice for centuries. Or they said, people could use “majority agreement,” with the adjective matching the gender of the noun with the biggest number of members. Or even, they said, writer’s choice. Unsurprisingly, in a country that defends its language with an official grammar arbiter and has a fondness for the circumflex, efforts to make French more gender-inclusive have been met with dismay: Members of the grammar-policing French Academy complained that they put French in “mortal peril,” and on Tuesday, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe forbade the use of “so-called inclusive writing” in official texts.”(NYT)

56 [...] Given how slowly French has changed over the centuries, at least compared with English, it seems likely that this is a debate that could continue for, well, centuries. (It’s not just French, by the way. Other languages, including Spanish and Arabic, also give the masculine the starring role.) But before we Anglophones congratulate ourselves on having a language that has pretty much jettisoned grammatical gender, we should consider [our own usages of] “everybody” and the default “he.”

57LANGUAGE, POLITICS, SEXISM 女 – What it means to be a Woman Looking at my native tongue Mandarin( is 9th on the list) Chinese, the spoken word sounds neutral; however, the phonetic form disguises a gendered written form. The Chinese word for he/ him, she/her, and they/them are pronounced with the same exact intonation but their neutral mask unravels in writing: He, Him: tā: 他 She, Her: tā: 她 It: tā: 它 He/him uses a “person (亻, from 人)” radical compared to she/her which uses a “female (女)” radical. Words such as ‘mother’ and ‘sister’ included the female radical, but so did many other words that stereotype women. A word composed purely of three female radicals together means ‘rape’ and ‘evil.’ It was a word so crude people I knew who understood the meaning could not bear to look at it. I started collecting these forms into a small glossary, and in doing so, I aimed to reclaim this word as one of community, strength, and generosity.

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74 *I want to note and acknowledge that I feel that the more appropriate word here perhaps should have been \"women\" rather than \"females.\" It was initially printed \"females\" as the radical \"女\" most straight forwardly translates to \"female\" but \"女\" is only used in relation to human biology and not any other species and so, I find \"women\" to be more appropriate. The nuances of translation is something I'll get to later.

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