GAD101 Week 7

• Sexism in language exists when language devalues members of a certain gender. Sexist language, in many instances, promotes male superiority.
• Sexism in language affects consciousness, perceptions of reality, encoding and transmitting cultural meanings and socialization.
• Nature - Language is one of the most powerful means through which sexism and gender discrimination are perpetrated and reproduced.
• Nature

  • The content of gender stereotypes, according to which women should display communal/warmth traits and men should display agentic/competence traits, is reflected in the lexical choices of everyday communication.
• Nature

  • As a consequence, language subtly reproduces the societal asymmetries of status and power in favor of men, which are attached to the corresponding social roles.
• Nature

  • Grammatical and syntactical rules are built in a way that feminine terms usually derive from the corresponding masculine form. Similarly, masculine nouns and pronouns are often used with a generic function to refer to both men and women.
• Nature

  • However, such linguistic forms have the negative effects of making women disappear in mental representations.
• Nature

  • Although the use of gender-fair linguistic expressions can effectively prevent these negative consequences and promote gender equality, there are even more implicit forms of gender bias in language that are difficult to suppress.
• Nature

  • By choosing terms at different levels of abstraction, people can affect the attributions of the receiver in a way that is consistent with their stereotypical beliefs.
• Nature

  • Linguistic abstraction, thus, is a very subtle resource used to represent women in a less favorable way and thus to enact gender discrimination without meaning to discriminate or even be aware that this linguistic behavior has discriminatory results.
• Nature

  • In order to reduce gender bias, it is necessary to change people’s linguistic habits by making them aware of the beneficial effects of gender-fair expressions.
• Gender-fair Language - minimizes unnecessary concern about gender in your subject matter, allowing both you and your reader to focus on what people do rather than on which sex they happen to be.
• Gender-fair Language

  • For example, the practice of using he and man as generic terms poses a common problem.
• Gender-fair Language

  • minimizes unnecessary concern about gender in your subject matter, allowing both you and your reader to focus on what people do rather than on which sex they happen to be.
• Gender-fair Language

  • Rather than presenting a general picture of reality, he and man used generically can mislead your audience.
• Gender-fair Language

  • Research by Wendy Martyna has shown that the average reader's tendency is to imagine a male when reading he or man, even if the rest of the passage is gender-neutral.
• Primarily relating to gender communication differences in professional settings, Pearson presented the terms masculine rhetoric versus feminine rhetoric, with the first one being decisive, direct, rational, authoritative, logical, aggressive, and impersonal, and the second being cautious, receptive, indirect, emotional, conciliatory, subjective, and polite.
• Some of the most frequently mentioned differences in gender communication are that, (1) women are more vocal than men; (2) women are more verbally skilled than men
• Some of the most frequently mentioned differences in gender communication are that, (3) men are more action oriented in their use of language, while women are more relationship oriented; (4) men are more competitive in their language use, while women are more cooperative
• Some of the most frequently mentioned differences in gender communication are that, (5) the above differences lead to regular communication frictions between men and women
• Some other communication differences often highlighted are, that men mainly communicate to support their prominence, while women do so to build relationships.
• Men smile less than women, women use more paralanguage

  (nonverbal indicators of listening and understanding) than men do.
• Men will use communicative touching more to confirm their dominance (pat on the back or shoulder), while women will touch for connection (arm-touching or offering a hug), and women use more eye contact than men.