Pronouns and Triviality

@sozobe,

sozobe wrote:

Like, "Any writer knows that he will have an easy time of changing a given non-idiomatic sentence to gender-neutral language."

(As an aside, and as a comment on how much I've internalized this I guess, it was really hard for me to make a gender-specific sentence! I'm a little less concerned that someone will find a post where I use a generic "he," now.)

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One more study, then I gotta go for a bit:

Quote:

This study and the vast majority of relevant research suggest that for the undergraduate population, the use of he biases the listener toward predominantly male images (see Todd-Mancillas, 1981; MacKay, 1983). Thus, using the generic he interferes with effective communication, and viable alternative pronouns exist -even the most obscure of which (e.g., tey) students readily comprehend (MacKay, 1980b; Todd-Mancillas & Meyers, 1980). Using MacKay's criterion, therefore, grammarians (and readers) should recommend the use of an alternative generic pronoun. Of course, if one acknowledges that language use has an effect on society, the harmful effects of the generic he mentioned above provide another argument for discouraging its usage. 4

http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/Gastil_1990.pdf

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Jeeze, that abstract is as bad as the last one. It doesn't attempt to demonstrate that nouns and pronouns are sexist, it assumes it at the outset. Talk about begging a question.

EDIT: This remark refers to the previous citation you made, not this most recent one.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

English doesn't have linguistic gender, so calling anything a "he" or "she" (such as ships) implies a sexual distinction that is absent from a language that has linguistic gender, such as German.

Says who, based on what evidence? My English grammar book, just as Max Dancona's dictionary, says it implies no such thing. All it implies is that the sex of the subject is undetermined.

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Ships are very likely called "she" because the root languages of Old English (Old Frisian--the most important--Old Saxon, Jutish and the old German of the Angeln) all used grammatical genders, and boats and ships were feminine nouns. Thomas would know better than i, but i suspect that it's the same as the case is with French, that the assignment of grammatical gender is capricious and arbitrary, and very likely not the product of any attitudes toward sexual gender.

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@sozobe,

That's not a very convincing study. Interesting, but not very convincing.

The numbers imply that saying "She/he will work ..." is more effective than saying "He/she will work ..." at attracting women to the field, but "She/he" is also more effective at attracting men (this seems backwards). These numbers are all within one standard deviation.

One thing about the study was my own reaction about reading the text used in this experiment.

They use "He" as a subject pronoun. This struck me as instinctively "wrong". I suppose that in my own mind, I see a difference between using "he" as a subject pronoun, then using it as an "object pronoun".

My intuition says where I would be fine writing "Each writer has his own standards of political correctness", I would almost certainly write "He or she writes standard English".

I hadn't considered this difference before.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

Jeeze, that abstract is as bad as the last one. It doesn't attempt to demonstrate that nouns and pronouns are sexist, it assumes it at the outset. Talk about begging a question.

The fact that female respondents were negatively affected by the pronouns in the two previous study-abstracts sozobe found suggests that they are indeed sexist, no?

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@medium-density,

No, it doesn't. We don't know the methodology. We don't know the forms and contents of statements or questions. We don't know the cultural and educational antecedents of the participants. All that we do know is that the authors of the study interpreted the reactions of female respondents as evincing a negative affect. Psychological and sociological studies are the absolute bottom feeders of scientific papers.

EDIT: A while back, someone started a thread about baby talk. A contention was made that women who use baby talk, now elevated to the status of "motherese," improved their child's language learning ability. I asked if that could be reconciled to societies in which they do not use baby talk, and even societies such as Samoa, where they don't speak to their infants at all. That question was met with resounding silence. One of the participants posted links to several abstracts of studies purporting to show a language acquisition benefit in children who had been exposed to "motherese." I thought to myself, well, that sh*t's easy. I went out and found abstracts to three or four studies which contradicted the claim, as well as a paper by the authors of a study which had been cited in all the previous sources who said that their study had been misinterpreted or misrepresented. Those authors named some of the scholars who had published the other studies.

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@sozobe,

sozobe wrote:

A challenge -- write a sentence where you think only the male pronoun will do, and I'll see how hard it is to change.

I don't think anybody in this thread is claiming it's intolerably hard. I certainly don't. I said in my very first post here that I generally do avoid the gender-neutral "he". (I also avoid the number-neutral "they". Both constructions seem imprecise to me.) As a pragmatic matter, I have no problem with that at all.

But I do have a problem when the demand for gender-neutral language comes packaged with moralistic finger-wagging about alleged paternalism and sexism. And my problem is aggravated by the dearth of evidence for such allegations.

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@sozobe,

Sozobe, citing a study, wrote:

Recent demands for nonsexist language may be supportable on the basis of a genuine relationship between sexist language and the maintenance of sex-biased perceptions.

Note: "may". If you're familiar with scientists' conventions of equivocation, you know you better append "or may not" in your mind. Don't take my word for it; ask the Evil Genius.

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@Thomas,

You are making a big leap there by calling psychological researchers "scientists". Scientific research is about testing hypotheses. Phsychological research is about confirming hypotheses. There is a big difference between the two.

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@medium-density,

Even assuming this experiment is perfect and the results are completely valid, it still doesn't suggest the pronouns are "sexist". This experiment is part of the discussion on whether the use of a pronoun can affect perceptions. This has nothing to do with them being "sexist".

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@maxdancona,

Great post . . . you have stated the case far more succinctly than i would have done.

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@maxdancona,

Yes, the universal he may or may not be used by a sexist in a sexist way. Let's say it's not. People may or may not be affected differently when they hear it.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Says who, based on what evidence? My English grammar book, just as Max Dancona's dictionary, says it implies no such thing. All it implies is that the sex of the subject is undetermined.

What does your grammar book say about the use of "she" to describe someone of an undetermined sex?

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

You are making a big leap there by calling psychological researchers "scientists". Scientific research is about testing hypotheses. Phsychological research is about confirming hypotheses. There is a big difference between the two.

I take your point, but I disagree. There is such a thing as psychological science, and there are psychologists who test their hypotheses rather than just seeking to confirm them.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

Thomas wrote:
Says who, based on what evidence? My English grammar book, just as Max Dancona's dictionary, says it implies no such thing. All it implies is that the sex of the subject is undetermined.

What does your grammar book say about the use of "she" to describe someone of an undetermined sex?

Nothing --- presumably because it's not standard usage, and my grammar book teaches standard usage.

Now that we've got this out of the way, will you answer my question? What is the evidence for your allegation that this particular arbitrary convention is sexist?

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@medium-density,

medium-density wrote:

Hi

I think you're speaking to the triviality of the question rather than acknowledging the importance of overturning sexism in all corners of our discourse. That's one way to come at the argument. A practical way.

But on the practicalities of it, yes I see what you mean. Wherever possible I use "they" rather than "he" or "she". Something as simple as "s/he" could also work.

Anyone else have a suggestion?

I only follow a strict use of gender neutral language for formal writings with an appropriate audience. Daily conventional communication doesn't care for such trivialities so as longs as communication is not impinged nor made less effective, by the majority anyway.

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@Setanta,

We know that the manipulation between the studies was the use of a pronoun, and this manipulation had the effect of making women react differently, depending on whether the pronoun was gender exclusive or not. It should follow that the universal "he" pronoun was having a negative effect in line with the detriments that sexism is the cause of.

Psychology and sociology are soft sciences, and we must be even more careful when interpreting the data of these disciplines compared with the hard sciences. But that's no reason to dismiss them out of hand. A favourite phrase in psychology is "this suggests that" -and I think we could do worse when discussing the nature of things in the social sphere.

With regard to what you say in your edit, I'm pretty sure I actually wrote an essay on that very subject for my degree. I'm not at liberty to dig it out now, but what I will say is that the situation you describe where evidence can be drafted in to either side of a debate is not unusual in social science, or any other scientific discipline. Progress towards a refined understanding of ___ is made by opposing strands of research being argued over, within a scientific framework (analysing each other's data, using new and improved methods to examine old findings) so your objections aren't completely damning, and indeed it would require a closer look at literature than (presumably) any of us have time (or inclination) to carry out, in order to say what's right, one way or the other.

I see quite a bit of wriggling around here in response to the studies that sozobe has found. Methodological concerns are important, but unless someone can do better than just say "Well, our knowledge of this study is less than exhaustive.", I'll remain confident that they support the sexist pronoun contentions some of us here are putting.

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@medium-density,

I've not been following this thread for various reasons but I would make a few points.
1. Firstly sociolinguistics rather than psychology is the field of study which correlates gender with language, and use of a default mode personal pronouns is a very minor item in a spectrum which can extend to gender specific pronunciations and lexicons in some cultures.
2. In those (Western) cultures where "equality" has become an issue, major proponents of language determining social reality, such as Foucault, argue that gender discrimination is predominantly embedded in seemingly innocuous statements like "It's a girl", rather than default mode pronouns. or overt usages such as "fireman".
3. Even if "social perception" is correlated with "language usage" it is not clear that regulation of the latter can affect the former, irrespective of null hypotheses rejected by psychologists (Note psychologists confirm nothing). At the end of the day social reality tends to mirror biological reality (not vice versa), and it is not clear whether mere advances in contraceptive and birth technology are sufficient to provide the equality lobby with enough force to alter that relationship to their satisfaction.

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