English as a Sexist Language Sociolinguistic researches, over the years have shown that the English language favors the masculine gender as opposed to the feminine. Sexism in the English language is only one of the many products brought to us by acculturation.
Examples of sexism in language and communications: The generic use of the masculine gender by a speaker (“he/his/him” to refer to an unspecific person). The cover of a publication depicting men only. The naming of a woman by the masculine term for her profession.
Examples of Sexist Language
For instance, the statement, "Each student chose his own topic for his term paper," leads the reader to assume that all the students in the class were male, despite the probability that half of them were female.
sexism, prejudice or discrimination based on sex or gender, especially against women and girls.
Sexism in Syntax
The sexism in English is to ignore women by allowing masculine terms to be used specifically refer to males and generically to refer to human beings in general. It is mainly shown in the pronouns: he, she, his, her, himself and herself.
Evaluating women less positively than men (e.g. in job application and promotion processes). Ignoring and talking over women. Side-lining women in social and work networks. Seemingly harmless comments about women, such as that they are naturally better at collaborating, detailed work, child care, cooking or shopping.
There are some languages that have no gender! Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and many other languages don't categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.
Example. A doctor cares for his patient. In this sentence, his is used as a generic form because it is intended to refer to any doctor, male or female. However, it implies that doctors are male, and therefore it excludes females.
Why do writers need to avoid sexist language? A writer wants to present a good ethos or character to the audience so the audience will find him or her believable. A good ethos will make your arguments even more convincing; a bad ethos will undermine your arguments by making your reader doubt your credibility.
English doesn't really have a grammatical gender as many other languages do. It doesn't have a masculine or a feminine for nouns, unless they refer to biological sex (e.g., woman, boy, Ms etc). So gendered language is commonly understood as language that has a bias towards a particular sex or social gender.
Languages such as Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Turkish, Indonesian and Vietnamese (to name just a few) do not have grammatical genders at all. Other languages have a gender distinction based on 'animacy', the distinction between animate beings (humans and animals of both sexes) and inanimate objects.
The world's four most spoken gendered languages are Hindi, Spanish, French and Arabic. They share many of the same gender patterns: masculine as the default grammatical gender, mixed-gender groups using masculine endings, and feminine nouns derived from masculine versions.
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They include generalised sexist remarks or attitudes, crude language and an overall workplace culture that is degrading or intimidating. Research shows that in workplaces that are perceived to be more tolerant or permissive of sexual harassment, people are more likely to experience sexual harassment.
Contrary to traditional sexism, which openly endorses the idea that women are inferior to men, modern sexism is a subtler form of prejudice that involves a resentment toward demands for gender inequality. Individuals who hold modern sexist attitudes often feel negatively about the shifting roles of women in society.
In contrast to many Indo-European (including Romance, Slavic and Germanic) languages, Japanese has no grammatical gender in its nouns or adjective agreement. Moreover, the Japanese honorifics such as -san and -sama are gender-neutral, which contrasts with Mr., Ms. or Mx.
In English, the four genders of noun are masculine, feminine, common, and neuter.
English will most likely not become the dominant world language as more people speak more than one language, a language expert reports. The world faces a future of people speaking more than one language, with English no longer seen as likely to become dominant, a British language expert says in a new analysis.
In order to avoid gender references, one can use gender-neutral terms, i.e. words that are not gender-specific and refer to people in general, with no reference to women or men ('chairman' is replaced by 'Chair' or 'chairperson', 'policeman' or 'policewoman' by 'police officer', 'spokesman' by 'spokesperson', ' ...
Daughter/Son
Child; neutral, formal. Offspring; neutral, formal. Sprog; neutral, informal.
Often parents have lots of terms of affection for their children that aren't gendered so they could use those. If you need to refer to someone's non-binary child you coould call them their child or their offspring, their little one, their youngster, rugrat, mini-me (or mini them)…
Diet pills or weight loss programs are advertised as “wellness” products, and anti-ageing creams are now branded as “ageless” or “age-defying.” One final example to look out for when it comes to sneaky sexism is the way brands phrase the “fix it” narrative.
Now it seems that sexism in English is largely "indirect sexism", that is, sexism which manifests itself at the level of presupposition, and also through innuendo, irony and humour, or which is prefaced by disclaimers or hesitation (Mills, 1998) For example, in the British television programme Men Behaving Badly, the ...