The Effects of Gender-Fair Forms on Perceived Gender Ratios in French Role Nouns

Beskrivning

In French, the masculine gender is used to designate either only men or a group of both women and men, whereas the feminine gender unambiguously refers to a group of only women. During the last two decades, psycholinguistic studies have investigated the effects of the generic use of the masculine grammatical gender on mental representations of gender. The results indicate that this generic use leads to a male bias, meaning that it impedes representations of women. To counteract this effect, French speakers have begun using various gender-fair forms like joggeur·euses, joggeuses et joggeurs or un groupe de jogging. While the effects of the generic masculine have been thoroughly investigated, few studies have examined the effects of gender-fair forms on representations of gender. With the aim of investigating the influence of different gender-fair forms, as compared to the masculine one, on perceived gender proportions of a role noun, we analysed 1018 native French speakers’ estimated percentage of women in 22 role nouns. The results showed that all kinds of gender-fair forms significantly increased the estimated percentage of women in comparison to the masculine form, and that no gender-fair form was significantly more efficient than any other. In addition, we found something slightly surprising: the more positive a participant’s attitudes towards gender-fair language were, the lower was their estimated percentage of women. This suggests that the participants who estimated lower percentages of women might be the ones who believe gender-fair language is necessary, and therefore hold more positive attitudes. Thus, the lower estimated percentages would rather be the cause of the positive attitudes than an effect of them. To conclude, this study demonstrate the effectiveness of gender-fair language in increasing representation of women and underline the necessity of further investigations on the relationship between attitudes towards gender-fair language and representations of gender.

Period	2023 mars 18
Evenemangstitel	AAAL Annual Conference, 2023: American Association for Applied Linguistics
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Portland, USA, OregonVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell