This is an interesting post, but Yvain, your made-up pronouns hurt my head. Every time I come to one it disrupts my reading flow and feels like my train of thought crashes into a brick wall. It genuinely makes the post more difficult and less pleasant to read for me. Couldn’t you just flip a coin for each new character you reference and give them male or female pronouns based on that?
I always use “one” as an indefinite pronoun, similar to how I would do it in German. Is that wrong?
...and only if one thinks this has a real chance of stopping the offending behavior either in this case or in the future.
or
...if so, one should nonjudgmentally request the offender stop while applying the Principle of Charity to the offender, and if one wants the maximum chance of the offense stopping, one should resist the urge to demand an apology or do anything else that could potentially turn it into a status game.
I always use “one” as an indefinite pronoun, similar to how I would do it in German.
From what I’ve heard, these days there are attempts to condemn man in German as sexist.
In English, I also like using “one” but it’s often too clumsy. As for those “ey” and “eir” pronouns, I find them not just extremely ugly, but also a very annoying obstruction while reading.
As for those “ey” and “eir” pronouns, I find them not just extremely ugly, but also a very annoying obstruction while reading.
Is it worth working to eliminate that negative reaction?
For what it’s worth, alternate pronouns don’t bother me. I don’t love them—I’ve never wanted to use alternate pronouns—but I just treat them like new vocabulary in science fiction (deduce meaning from context) and proceed.
Is that what that was? I had assumed that the text had been copied from some typesetting system that made a ‘th’ ligature glyph which didn’t survive the copying process.
I actually stopped noticing it pretty quickly. That’s what comes from reading a lot of poorly OCRed ebooks.
From what I’ve heard, these days there are attempts to condemn man in German as sexist.
True (because it is pronounced the same way as “Mann”), but what can we do about such problems? It seems that using “made up” pronouns until they are integrated is the most natural way of fixing the problem?
You could also work around the problem though, but it requires some effort:
The victim should judge whether ey believes the offense causes more pain to em than it does benefit to the offender; if so, ey should nonjudgmentally request the offender stop while applying the Principle of Charity to the offender, and if ey wants the maximum chance of the offense stopping, ey should resist the urge to demand an apology or do anything else that could potentially turn it into a status game.
versus
Victims should judge whether they believe the offense causes more pain to them than it does benefit to the offender; if so, they should nonjudgmentally request the offender stop while applying the Principle of Charity to the offender, and if they want the maximum chance of the offense stopping, they should resist the urge to demand an apology or do anything else that could potentially turn it into a status game.
Or you simply use “an agent” so that you can use “it”...
In the grammars of Slavic languages, including my native one (Croatian), grammatical gender is so pervasive that it would be altogether impossible to speak without using the masculine gender as the default. For example, in the past tense even verbs have gender, so if you want to ask, say, “who was that?”, you have to say “who masculine-was that?” Asking “who feminine-was that?” is ungrammatical, even if the answer is certain to be female. There are countless such situations where you simply have to accept that the male subsumes the female to be able to speak at all.
Therefore, when someone claims that using masculine by default is evil, he (hah!) is thereby claiming that my native language is evil, and irreparably so. Should I get offended?
Just to get away from the politics around real-world examples, suppose I speak a language that genders its verbs based on the height of the object—that is, there are separate markings for above-average height, below-average height, and average height.
It’s an empirical question whether, if I’m figuring out who to hire for a job, asking the question “Whom should we tall-hire?” makes me more likely to hire a tall person than asking “Whom should we short-hire?” If it’s true, it is; evil doesn’t enter into it under most understandings of evil. It’s just a fact about the language and about cognitive biases.
If the best available candidate for the job happens to be tall, but I ask myself whom I should short-hire, the way I’m talking about the job introduces bias into my hiring process that makes me less likely to hire the best available candidate. This also isn’t evil, but it’s a mistake.
If my language’s rules are such that this height-based gender-marking is non-optional, then this mistake is non-optional. My native language is, in that case, irreparably bias-ridden in this way.
Suppose I want to hire the best candidates. What can I do then?
Well, one thing I might do is deliberately alternate among “short-hire,” “tall-hire,” and “average-hire” in my speech, so as to reduce the systematic bias introduced by my choice of verb. Of course, if my language forces me to use “short-hire” for an unspecified-height target, then doing that is ungrammatical.
Another option is to make up a new way of speaking about hiring… perhaps borrow the equivalent verb from another language, or make up new words, so I can ask “whom should I hire?” without using a height-based gender marking at all. But maybe, inconveniently, my language is such that foreign loan verbs must also be marked in this way.
A third option is to systematically train myself so I am no longer subject to the selection bias that naive speakers of my language demonstrate. But there are opportunity costs associated with that training process, and maybe I don’t want to bother.
Ultimately, what I do will depend on how important speaking grammatically is to me, how important hiring optimal employees is, and so forth. If I lose significant status or clarity by speaking ungrammatically, I may prefer to hire suboptimal employees.
Should I get offended if someone points that out? Again, it depends on my goals. If I want to improve my ability to choose the best available candidate, then getting offended in that case is counter-productive. If I want to defend my choice to speak traditionally, then getting offended works reasonably well.
My above comment was made in a bit of jest, as I hope is clear. Still, some people do make a deep moral issue over “sexist” language, and insofar as they do, moral condemnation of much more heavily gendered languages than English is an inevitable logical consequence.
Regarding the supposed biases arising due to gendered language, do you think that they exist to a significant degree in practice? While it’s not a watertight argument to the contrary, I still think it’s significant that, to my knowledge, nobody has ever demonstrated any cross-cultural correlation between gender-related norms and customs and the linguistic role of gender. (For what that’s worth, of all Indo-European languages, the old I-E gender system has been most thoroughly lost in Persian, which doesn’t even have the he-she distinction.)
Also, when I reflect on my own native language and the all-pervasive use of masculine as the default gender, I honestly can’t imagine any plausible concrete examples of biases analogous to your hypothetical example with height. Of course, I may be biased in this regard myself.
I agree that some people do treat as moral failings many practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.
I also think that some people react to that by defending practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.
Regarding the supposed biases arising due to gendered language, do you think that they exist to a significant degree in practice?
I’m not sure.
One way I might approach the question is to teach an experimental subject some new words to denote new roles, and then have the subjects select people to fill those roles based on resumes. By manipulating the genderedness of the name used for the role (e.g., “farner,” “farness,” or “farnist”) and the nominal sex of the candidate (e.g., male or female), we could determine what effect an X-gendered term had on the odds of choosing a Y-sexed candidate.
I have no idea if that study has been performed.
So, for example, would I expect English-speakers (on average) selecting a candidate for the role of “farness” to select a female candidate more often than for the role of “farner”?
Yes, I think so. Probably not a huge difference, though. Call it a 65% confidence for a statistically significant difference.
What’s your estimate? (Or, if you’d rather operationalize the question differently, go for it.)
I was going to write a more detailed reply, but seeing the literature cited in the book linked by Conchis, I should probably read up on the topic before expressing any further opinions. It could be that I’m underestimating the magnitude of such effects.
That said, one huge difficulty with issues of prejudice and discrimination in general is that what looks like a bias caused by malice, ignorance, or unconscious error is often in fact an instance of accurate statisticaldiscrimination. Rational statistical discrimination is usually very hard to disentangle from various factors that supposedly trigger irrational biases, since all kinds of non-obvious correlations might be lurking everywhere. At the same time, a supposed finding of a factor that triggers irrational bias is a valuable and publishable result for people researching such things, so before I accept any of these findings, I’ll have to give them a careful look.
Agreed that attribution of things like malice, ignorance, error, and bias to people is tricky… much as with evil, earlier.
This is why I reframed your original question (asking me whether I thought gendered language introduced bias to a significant degree) in a more operational form, actually.
In any case, though, I endorse holding off on expressing opinions while one gathers data (for all that I don’t seem to do it very much myself).
My understanding of the relevant research* is that it’s a fairly consistent finding that masculine generics (a) do cause people to imagine men rather than women, and (b) that this can have negative effects ranging from impaired recall, comprehension, and self-esteem in women, to reducing female job applications. (Some of these negative effects have also been established for men from feminine generics as well, which favours using they/them/their rather than she/her as replacements.)
* There’s an overview of some of this here (from p.26).
My understanding of the relevant research* is that it’s a fairly consistent finding that masculine generics (a) do cause people to imagine men rather than women, and (b) that this can have negative effects ranging from impaired recall, comprehension, and self-esteem in women, to reducing female job applications. (Some of these negative effects have also been established for men from feminine generics as well, which favours using they/them/their rather than she/her as replacements.)
There’s an overview of some of this here (from p.26).
Sometimes I wonder why it’s called “grammatical gender” at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there’s no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called “grammatical colour” or “grammatical arbitrary class”.
On the other hand, you’d be lucky to be able to exert enough control on convention to make “he” into that kind of word.
Sometimes I wonder why it’s called “grammatical gender” at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there’s no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called “grammatical colour” or “grammatical arbitrary class”.
The Chinese and Japanese character for “sex” (as in, which reproductive organs you have) can also be translated as “a quality” or “nature”: 性 is the same character used for “nature” in the expression “Buddha-nature”, i.e. “the characteristic quality of a Buddha”. The concept could possibly also be expressed as “distinction”, as in the limerick of the young lady from Exeter; or as “difference” as in the French expression “Vive la différence” (“Long live the difference” between men and women).
The concept of “grammatical gender” in linguistics is often taken to be a specialization of the more general concept of “noun class”. Some languages, particularly African languages closer to the likely point of origin of human language, grammatically distinguish a large number of different noun classes, for particular kinds of things. Some European languages make a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, but most preserve only the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns.
This may be taken as indicating that as human languages continually diversify and mix in human societies, that the distinctions which are preserved are those which human societies find the most significant: distinctions of sex. Which isn’t surprising, since humans do need language to talk about and perform mate selection, where (for almost all humans) sex is highly significant.
English does not express grammatical gender on nouns in general, as French or German do. Indeed, even remaining feminizing suffixes such as -ess are falling out of use: uses such as “poetess” and “authoress” are now seen as dated (and sexist), and even “actress” is obsolescent. However, like other Indo-European languages (but unlike the Finno-Ugric languages, or many East Asian languages) English retains gendered pronouns.
It is not at all clear that removing gender from pronouns is a step in the direction of a less sexist society. Japanese does not use gendered pronouns except for intimate relations; but few would assert that Japan had perfect sexual equality. Sweden is often identified as a society with an unusually high level of sexual equality; but Swedish has gendered pronouns. However, deliberately using gender-neutral pronouns in English draws attention to the gender distinction, and implicitly asks, “Why are we making this distinction here, when we’re not doing mate selection right now?”
Well, that’s interesting, although it still doesn’t explain—or rather, justify—the use of the words masculine and feminine for a distinction that has nothing to do with sex. You’d just end up with people getting confused by the words and thinking words like feminine-was have genders or something (whatever it even means for a string of phonemes to have a gender).
Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers.
It’s generally correct in English to use “one” as an indefinite pronoun, but it’s not common casual usage and is not easy to do smoothly.
Though I would nevertheless consider it preferable every time to using made-up pronouns. Singular “they” generally works more smoothly than either alternative.
This is an interesting post, but Yvain, your made-up pronouns hurt my head. Every time I come to one it disrupts my reading flow and feels like my train of thought crashes into a brick wall. It genuinely makes the post more difficult and less pleasant to read for me. Couldn’t you just flip a coin for each new character you reference and give them male or female pronouns based on that?
Another option would be to use “they”.
I always use “one” as an indefinite pronoun, similar to how I would do it in German. Is that wrong?
or
From what I’ve heard, these days there are attempts to condemn man in German as sexist.
In English, I also like using “one” but it’s often too clumsy. As for those “ey” and “eir” pronouns, I find them not just extremely ugly, but also a very annoying obstruction while reading.
Is it worth working to eliminate that negative reaction?
For what it’s worth, alternate pronouns don’t bother me. I don’t love them—I’ve never wanted to use alternate pronouns—but I just treat them like new vocabulary in science fiction (deduce meaning from context) and proceed.
Oh? “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.”
I kid.
Is that what that was? I had assumed that the text had been copied from some typesetting system that made a ‘th’ ligature glyph which didn’t survive the copying process.
I actually stopped noticing it pretty quickly. That’s what comes from reading a lot of poorly OCRed ebooks.
True (because it is pronounced the same way as “Mann”), but what can we do about such problems? It seems that using “made up” pronouns until they are integrated is the most natural way of fixing the problem?
You could also work around the problem though, but it requires some effort:
versus
Or you simply use “an agent” so that you can use “it”...
In the grammars of Slavic languages, including my native one (Croatian), grammatical gender is so pervasive that it would be altogether impossible to speak without using the masculine gender as the default. For example, in the past tense even verbs have gender, so if you want to ask, say, “who was that?”, you have to say “who masculine-was that?” Asking “who feminine-was that?” is ungrammatical, even if the answer is certain to be female. There are countless such situations where you simply have to accept that the male subsumes the female to be able to speak at all.
Therefore, when someone claims that using masculine by default is evil, he (hah!) is thereby claiming that my native language is evil, and irreparably so. Should I get offended?
(shrug) “Evil” confuses the issue.
Just to get away from the politics around real-world examples, suppose I speak a language that genders its verbs based on the height of the object—that is, there are separate markings for above-average height, below-average height, and average height.
It’s an empirical question whether, if I’m figuring out who to hire for a job, asking the question “Whom should we tall-hire?” makes me more likely to hire a tall person than asking “Whom should we short-hire?” If it’s true, it is; evil doesn’t enter into it under most understandings of evil. It’s just a fact about the language and about cognitive biases.
If the best available candidate for the job happens to be tall, but I ask myself whom I should short-hire, the way I’m talking about the job introduces bias into my hiring process that makes me less likely to hire the best available candidate. This also isn’t evil, but it’s a mistake.
If my language’s rules are such that this height-based gender-marking is non-optional, then this mistake is non-optional. My native language is, in that case, irreparably bias-ridden in this way.
Suppose I want to hire the best candidates. What can I do then?
Well, one thing I might do is deliberately alternate among “short-hire,” “tall-hire,” and “average-hire” in my speech, so as to reduce the systematic bias introduced by my choice of verb. Of course, if my language forces me to use “short-hire” for an unspecified-height target, then doing that is ungrammatical.
Another option is to make up a new way of speaking about hiring… perhaps borrow the equivalent verb from another language, or make up new words, so I can ask “whom should I hire?” without using a height-based gender marking at all. But maybe, inconveniently, my language is such that foreign loan verbs must also be marked in this way.
A third option is to systematically train myself so I am no longer subject to the selection bias that naive speakers of my language demonstrate. But there are opportunity costs associated with that training process, and maybe I don’t want to bother.
Ultimately, what I do will depend on how important speaking grammatically is to me, how important hiring optimal employees is, and so forth. If I lose significant status or clarity by speaking ungrammatically, I may prefer to hire suboptimal employees.
Should I get offended if someone points that out? Again, it depends on my goals. If I want to improve my ability to choose the best available candidate, then getting offended in that case is counter-productive. If I want to defend my choice to speak traditionally, then getting offended works reasonably well.
My above comment was made in a bit of jest, as I hope is clear. Still, some people do make a deep moral issue over “sexist” language, and insofar as they do, moral condemnation of much more heavily gendered languages than English is an inevitable logical consequence.
Regarding the supposed biases arising due to gendered language, do you think that they exist to a significant degree in practice? While it’s not a watertight argument to the contrary, I still think it’s significant that, to my knowledge, nobody has ever demonstrated any cross-cultural correlation between gender-related norms and customs and the linguistic role of gender. (For what that’s worth, of all Indo-European languages, the old I-E gender system has been most thoroughly lost in Persian, which doesn’t even have the he-she distinction.)
Also, when I reflect on my own native language and the all-pervasive use of masculine as the default gender, I honestly can’t imagine any plausible concrete examples of biases analogous to your hypothetical example with height. Of course, I may be biased in this regard myself.
I agree that some people do treat as moral failings many practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.
I also think that some people react to that by defending practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.
I’m not sure.
One way I might approach the question is to teach an experimental subject some new words to denote new roles, and then have the subjects select people to fill those roles based on resumes. By manipulating the genderedness of the name used for the role (e.g., “farner,” “farness,” or “farnist”) and the nominal sex of the candidate (e.g., male or female), we could determine what effect an X-gendered term had on the odds of choosing a Y-sexed candidate.
I have no idea if that study has been performed.
So, for example, would I expect English-speakers (on average) selecting a candidate for the role of “farness” to select a female candidate more often than for the role of “farner”?
Yes, I think so. Probably not a huge difference, though. Call it a 65% confidence for a statistically significant difference.
What’s your estimate? (Or, if you’d rather operationalize the question differently, go for it.)
I was going to write a more detailed reply, but seeing the literature cited in the book linked by Conchis, I should probably read up on the topic before expressing any further opinions. It could be that I’m underestimating the magnitude of such effects.
That said, one huge difficulty with issues of prejudice and discrimination in general is that what looks like a bias caused by malice, ignorance, or unconscious error is often in fact an instance of accurate statistical discrimination. Rational statistical discrimination is usually very hard to disentangle from various factors that supposedly trigger irrational biases, since all kinds of non-obvious correlations might be lurking everywhere. At the same time, a supposed finding of a factor that triggers irrational bias is a valuable and publishable result for people researching such things, so before I accept any of these findings, I’ll have to give them a careful look.
Agreed that attribution of things like malice, ignorance, error, and bias to people is tricky… much as with evil, earlier.
This is why I reframed your original question (asking me whether I thought gendered language introduced bias to a significant degree) in a more operational form, actually.
In any case, though, I endorse holding off on expressing opinions while one gathers data (for all that I don’t seem to do it very much myself).
My understanding of the relevant research* is that it’s a fairly consistent finding that masculine generics (a) do cause people to imagine men rather than women, and (b) that this can have negative effects ranging from impaired recall, comprehension, and self-esteem in women, to reducing female job applications. (Some of these negative effects have also been established for men from feminine generics as well, which favours using they/them/their rather than she/her as replacements.)
* There’s an overview of some of this here (from p.26).
I wonder if they tested whether individuals suffer similar negative effects from plural generics.
My understanding of the relevant research* is that it’s a fairly consistent finding that masculine generics (a) do cause people to imagine men rather than women, and (b) that this can have negative effects ranging from impaired recall, comprehension, and self-esteem in women, to reducing female job applications. (Some of these negative effects have also been established for men from feminine generics as well, which favours using they/them/their rather than she/her as replacements.)
There’s an overview of some of this here (from p.26).
Sometimes I wonder why it’s called “grammatical gender” at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there’s no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called “grammatical colour” or “grammatical arbitrary class”.
On the other hand, you’d be lucky to be able to exert enough control on convention to make “he” into that kind of word.
As it turns out, that’s exactly the original meaning of the word “gender”—of which the French translation is genre.
The Chinese and Japanese character for “sex” (as in, which reproductive organs you have) can also be translated as “a quality” or “nature”: 性 is the same character used for “nature” in the expression “Buddha-nature”, i.e. “the characteristic quality of a Buddha”. The concept could possibly also be expressed as “distinction”, as in the limerick of the young lady from Exeter; or as “difference” as in the French expression “Vive la différence” (“Long live the difference” between men and women).
The concept of “grammatical gender” in linguistics is often taken to be a specialization of the more general concept of “noun class”. Some languages, particularly African languages closer to the likely point of origin of human language, grammatically distinguish a large number of different noun classes, for particular kinds of things. Some European languages make a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, but most preserve only the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns.
This may be taken as indicating that as human languages continually diversify and mix in human societies, that the distinctions which are preserved are those which human societies find the most significant: distinctions of sex. Which isn’t surprising, since humans do need language to talk about and perform mate selection, where (for almost all humans) sex is highly significant.
English does not express grammatical gender on nouns in general, as French or German do. Indeed, even remaining feminizing suffixes such as -ess are falling out of use: uses such as “poetess” and “authoress” are now seen as dated (and sexist), and even “actress” is obsolescent. However, like other Indo-European languages (but unlike the Finno-Ugric languages, or many East Asian languages) English retains gendered pronouns.
It is not at all clear that removing gender from pronouns is a step in the direction of a less sexist society. Japanese does not use gendered pronouns except for intimate relations; but few would assert that Japan had perfect sexual equality. Sweden is often identified as a society with an unusually high level of sexual equality; but Swedish has gendered pronouns. However, deliberately using gender-neutral pronouns in English draws attention to the gender distinction, and implicitly asks, “Why are we making this distinction here, when we’re not doing mate selection right now?”
Only partially true: the Japanese language has differently gendered versions of “I”. Pronouns for “you” are indeed generally reserved for intimate relations, and third person pronouns don’t seem to exist at all, as far as I can tell.
Well, that’s interesting, although it still doesn’t explain—or rather, justify—the use of the words masculine and feminine for a distinction that has nothing to do with sex. You’d just end up with people getting confused by the words and thinking words like feminine-was have genders or something (whatever it even means for a string of phonemes to have a gender).
Although I agree it’s odd, it does in fact seem that there is gender information transferred / inferred from grammatical gender.
From Lera Boroditsky’s Edge piece
It’s generally correct in English to use “one” as an indefinite pronoun, but it’s not common casual usage and is not easy to do smoothly.
Though I would nevertheless consider it preferable every time to using made-up pronouns. Singular “they” generally works more smoothly than either alternative.