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Exchanging the Generic Masculine for Gender- Balanced Forms - The Impact of Context Valence

DOI:10.1024/1421-0185.63.4.273
Authors:
Ute Gabriel at Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Ute Gabriel
Franziska Mellenberger
Franziska Mellenberger
Franziska Mellenberger
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Abstract

Research on the generic masculine (i.e., male nouns used in gender-overlapping or gender-abstracting way) and its alternatives has repeatedly revealed that in German the generic masculine is more strongly associated with male persons than other types of generic. As research has only been done in positive or neutral contexts we extended a study by Stahlberg et al. (2001, Experiment 1) to test whether the results can be generalized across valences. The experiment (N = 156) revealed that gender-balancing forms are more frequently associated with women than the generic masculine. This held especially true for male participants. With reference to the valence manipulation female participants tended to show asymmetric ingroup favoritism whereas male participants' preference for same sex associations was indifferent to the valence manipulation. Results are discussed in light of cognitive and motivational consequences of the different generics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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... However, they found no interaction between the linguistic form that was used and participant gender. Although the same effects for participant gender were reported by Keith et al. (2022), Gabriel and Mellenberger (2004) found that men named almost no female exemplars when the generic masculine was used and women were more sensitive to inclusive forms. This finding suggests that there may be an interaction between the linguistic form used and gender, with women being more inclined to provide female exemplars when presented with inclusive forms, whereas the specific form that is used does not seem to affect men. ...
... However, it is less clear whether forms that have been advocated more recently will be effective in reducing bias in the current context. Furthermore, it is currently unclear what role the gender of the participant plays in understanding the kind of cognitive effects that the various forms give rise to, as some studies found main effects of participant gender , whereas other studies suggested the presence of an interaction effect (Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004). ...
... Hypothesis 2: The higher mental availability of nonmasculine exemplars will be particularly pronounced for female participants who are exposed to the gender star. Linguistic form and participant gender are thus thought to interact 2 (see Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004;Koeser & Sczesny, 2014). ...
A star is born? The German gender star and its effects on mental representation
Article
Full-text available
Although generic masculine forms supposedly include everyone, they seem to evoke masculine representations to the exclusion of other genders (Stahlberg & Sczesny, 2001). Gender-inclusive alternatives may yield more inclusive representations, but this has not been investigated extensively. The current study focused on German and contrasts generic masculine forms (Politiker, politicians) with the gender star (Politiker*innen, politicians [m/f/d]) in order to assess whether they differ in the mental availability of nonmasculine exemplars. The findings suggest that linguistic form matters, as more female exemplars were listed when participants were exposed to the gender star, although very few other nonmasculine exemplars were mentioned. Furthermore, female participants listed more nonmasculine exemplars than male participants, but, as the sample was skewed (more female than male participants), this result is tentative. Thus, the gender star leads to more inclusive mental representations, but other factors likely also play a role in determining the prominence of nonmasculine exemplars.
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... With regards to English, a so-called natural gender language (i.e. a language that marks gender on personal pronouns only), the generic singular pronoun he was found to favor the presence of men in people's mental representations compared to singular they and the alternative he/she (Gastil, 77 1990;Hamilton, 1988;Martyna, 1978). As for the masculine plural form of nouns, several studies have provided evidence that it likewise disfavors the presence of women in mental representations (Brauer & Landry, 2008;Braun et al., 1998;Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004;Gygax et al., , 2012Horvath et al., 2016;Irmen, 2007;Irmen & Roßberg, 2004;Kollmayer et al., 2018;. Most of them manipulated the gender stereotype of the nountypically a role name (e.g. ...
... Other studies have compared masculine plurals with gender-fair alternatives (Brauer & Landry, 2008;Braun et al., 1998;Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004;Horvath et al., 2016;Kollmayer et al., 2018;Sato et al., 2016;. Crucially, double-gender forms andin Germanthe innovative capital-I and nominalized forms typically yield a stronger representation of women than masculine forms. ...
... As to the relatively increased representation of women induced by the gender-fair plural forms compared to the masculine plural, our results are in accordance with previous studies on both French (Brauer & Landry, 2008; and German (Braun et al., 1998;Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004;Horvath et al., 2016;Kollmayer et al., 2018). Both these languages have an innovative neutralizing form alongside the more conventional double-gender, i.e. middot in French and capital-I in German. ...
Gender in language and gender in the social mind
Thesis
  • Dec 2021
The various facets of gender play an important role in shaping our cultures. People are categorized into males or females based on their biological sex; human languages differ in how gender is encoded in the language structure; and in society, different gender ideologies exist concerning what roles and positions men and women should occupy. The relationships between these facets are often intertwined. In this dissertation, I first investigate the relationship between language and people’s mental representations of gender (Chapters 2 and 3). In particular, I ask if assigning grammatical masculine or feminine gender to nouns denoting inanimate objects would make native speakers think of these objects as having “male” or “female” qualities, a language effect as postulated by the Neo-Whorfian hypothesis that linguistic categories affect people’s construal of the world entities. Extensive piloting work on this topic suggests null effects of grammatical gender on speakers’ conceptualization of objects. Unlike object nouns, the grammatical gender of person nouns is meaningful in that it has a semantic underpinning (i.e. male – masculine; female - feminine). I then examine the influences of grammatical gender on people’s perceptions of male-female distributions across various professions in two experiments, and found that different language forms induce differential male and female associations, some of which are consistent, others biased. Finally, I explore the relationship between individuals’ moral attitudes on gender equality – the extent to which gender equality is deemed to be a moral imperative – and their trust in written scientific evidence of hiring bias disfavoring women in academia (Chapter 4). Six experiments show that people of greater moral commitment to gender equality are more receptive of research revealing a hiring bias against females. Overall, the dissertation demonstrates that the encoding of gender in language has impacts on the mental representations of gender groups but likely not on those of inanimate objects, and that individuals’ gender attitudes influence their reactions to research on gender bias.
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... In fact, in , there was no difference between masculine-feminine word pairs and masculine generics with regard to the female exemplars listed. This result is inconsistent with studies that do find such a difference (Brauer, 2008;Gabriel, 2008;Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004). This inconsistency of results may well be due to insufficient power. ...
... A handful of studies exist that used a somewhat similar task (i.e., to list exemplars of an occupational category). These studies, however, do not constitute replications because they used specific instructions and different manipulations (e.g., participants were asked to list their favorite vs. leastliked personalities, personal heros, or good prime ministers of the political left vs. right; Brauer, 2008;Gabriel, 2008;Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004; see also Sniezek & Jazwinski, 1986). Also, as mentioned above, the studies' results did not fully converge, which may be due to the differences in study designs and manipulations. ...
Ladies First or Ladies Last: Do Masculine Generics Evoke a Reduced and Later Retrieval of Female Exemplars?
Article
Full-text available
  • Mar 2022
The use of masculine generics (i.e., grammatically masculine forms that refer to both men and women) is prevalent in many languages but has been criticized for potentially triggering male bias. Empirical evidence for this claim exists but is often based on small and selective samples. This study is a high-powered and pre-registered replication and extension of a 20-year-old study on this biasing effect in German speakers. Under 1 of 4 conditions (masculine generics vs. three gender-inclusive alternatives), 344 participants listed 3 persons of 6 popular occupational categories (e.g., athletes, politicians). Despite 20 years of societal changes, results were remarkably similar, underscoring the high degree of automaticity involved in language comprehension (large effects of 0.71 to 1.12 of a standard deviation). Male bias tended to be particularly pronounced later rather than early in retrieval, suggesting that salient female exemplars may be recalled first but that male exemplars still dominate the overall categorical representations.
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... For example, die Musiker (the German word for musicians) which can be understood as masculine or generic, was automatically interpreted as masculine in Gygax et al. (2008). Most empirical research shows that masculine forms primarily elicit malespecific interpretations, compared to gender-balanced language alternatives that include the image of women (Gabriel and Mellenberger, 2004;Stahlberg et al., 2007;Gygax et al., 2008Gygax et al., , 2009). Thus, when readers have two options for interpreting the masculine form, they usually resort to a specific interpretation of the form as masculine, thus evoking the male bias. ...
The effects of grammatical gender on the processing of occupational role names in Slovene: An event-related potential study
Article
Full-text available
  • Dec 2022
The event-related potential method has proven to be a useful tool for studying the effects of gender information in language. Studies have shown that mismatch between the antecedent and the following referent triggers two ERP components, N400 and P600. In the present study, we investigated how grammatical gender affects the mental representation of the grammatical subject. A match-mismatch paradigm was used to investigate how masculine grammatical gender and gender-balanced forms (the explicit mention of masculine and feminine forms as word pairs) as role nouns affect the processing of the referent in Slovenian. The morphological complexity of Slovenian language required the use of anaphoric verbs instead of nouns/pronouns, on which previous research was based. The results showed that following both the gender-balanced and the masculine generic forms, P600 (but not N400) was observed in response to the feminine verb but not to the masculine verb. The P600 amplitude was smaller in the case of the gender-balanced form than in the case of the masculine generic form only. We have concluded that gender-balanced forms are more open to feminine continuations than masculine generic forms. This is the first ERP study in Slovenian to address the effects of processing grammatical gender, thus contributing to existing research on languages with grammatical gender. The great strength of the study is that it is one of the first ERP studies to test the mental inclusivity of gender-balanced forms.
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... A plausible way is, therefore, to compare groups of native Chinese speakers learning English as a foreign language and differing in English proficiency, and to explore their perception of same-race faces (i.e., Caucasian faces in the present study). What is more, participants' gender might be another confounding factor, because people make a faster judgment about human faces that are of the same gender as their own (Zarate & Smith, 1990), and males are more likely to have a male-biased reading of masculine generic role nouns (Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004). Thus, the present study recruited the same number of male and female participants and counterbalanced the effect of gender in the experiment procedure. ...
Effects of English Proficiency on Caucasian Face Gender Perception by Chinese-English Bilinguals: Evidence from ERP
Article
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  • Aug 2022
Chinese and English differ in the encoding of biological gender in the spoken forms of 3rd person singular pronouns. Linguistic relativity theories predict that structural differences across languages are accompanied with differences in non-linguistic cognition. However, the pronoun difference between the two languages seems so trivial that its influence on gender perception is unbelievable except with empirical support. The present study conducted an ERP experiment with native speakers of Chinese learning English as a foreign language and differing in English proficiency. The odd-ball paradigm was used to examine whether L2 proficiency would influence how these Chinese-English bilinguals perform on Caucasian face gender perception. The experiment yielded null effect of L2 proficiency on the vMMN that was elicited for the gender category, as well as the control age category. The results suggest that the difference in the pronoun encoding of biological gender between Chinese and English may not influence gender perception in the nonlinguistic context, although it is not surprising considering the triviality of such cross-linguistic difference and the widespread gender binary opposition in daily life.
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... For example, after reading generic masculine forms, participants were faster and more accurate to react to male compared to female exemplars and subgroups (e.g., Garnham and Yakovlev, 2015;Gygax et al., 2008Gygax et al., , 2012Irmen and Roßberg, 2004). Analogue results have been observed when participants estimated the proportion of women compared to men in a group (Braun et al., 1998;Hansen et al., 2016), named exemplars from occupational groups ; see also Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004), reported the gender of previously imagined people (Hamilton, 1988;Gastil, 1990), decided on first names (Heise, 2000;Kaufmann & Bohner, 2014;Vervecken et al., 2013) or selected pictures (Bailey & LaFrance, 2017;Schneider & Hacker, 1973). In sum, in a substantial number of studies-using, for example, English, French, German, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish-generic masculine forms did not lead to balanced gender representations but yielded a male bias. ...
Gender Representations Elicited by the Gender Star Form
Article
Full-text available
In many languages, masculine language forms are not only used to designate the male gender but also to operate in a generic fashion. This dual function has been found to lead to male biased representations when people encounter the generic masculine. In German, the now predominant substitute is the gender star form (e.g., Athlet*innen). In two experiments, we examined gender representations elicited when reading the gender star form (vs. generic masculine vs. pair forms). We found that, following the generic masculine, continuations about men (vs. women) were more frequently and more quickly judged to be compatible, replicating the male bias, even though participants were informed about the generic intention. Following the gender star form, a female bias in judgments (both Studies) and speed (only Study 2) occurred, which was somewhat smaller. Representations were most balanced when both male and female forms were mentioned.
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... językowej niewidoczności (wykluczenia) kobiet i wywołuje głównie męskie skojarzenia, co wykazano na gruncie wielu języków, np. angielskiego (Gastil 1991), hiszpańskiego (Nissen 2002), rosyjskiego (Doleschal i Schmid 2001), niemieckiego (Gabriel i Mellenberger 2004) czy polskiego (Bojarska 2011). Natomiast stosowanie języka inkluzywnego, obejmującego użycie form obu rodzajów lub dwurodzajowych, wyrównuje liczbę męskich i kobiecych skojarzeń. ...
O nierówności płci w języku i jej skutkach. Polemika z tezami artykułu Ignacego Nasalskiego pt. „Funkcje i dysfunkcje języka inkluzywnego, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem asymetrii rodzajowej w języku polskim”
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Artykuł stanowi polemikę z tezami Ignacego Nasalskiego zawartymi w tekście pt. „Funkcje i dysfunkcje języka inkluzywnego, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem asymetrii rodzajowej w języku polskim” (Socjolingwistyka 2020), w którym Autor twierdzi, że system rodzajowy języków, rozumiany jako (a)symetrie między nazwami męskimi i żeńskimi, ma znikomy wpływ na sytuację społeczną kobiet, czego dowodzi różna struktura rodzajowa języków arabskiego, perskiego i polskiego, nieprzekładająca się na równouprawnienie kobiet w krajach, gdzie są one używane. W związku z tym faktem Autor kwestionuje zasadność tworzenia i stosowania nowych feminatywów w polszczyźnie. W niniejszym artykule wskazano liczne uproszczenia w argumentacji Nasalskiego, a także pomijanie przez niego wielu prac przedstawiających i dokumentujących odmienny punkt widzenia. Dotyczą one nierówności płci w języku arabskim oraz badań nad wpływem języka na nasze myślenie i zachowania, a także negatywnych konsekwencji stosowania języka wykluczającego oraz korzyści z używania form o charakterze równościowym.
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... In addition to gender stereotypes, language users may also draw on another source of information to infer a person's gender when it is not explicitly mentioned. Specifically, masculine generics are masculine forms that are used to refer to people of unknown or unspecified gender or to groups of people of mixed gender (e.g., Braun, Sczesny, & Stahlberg, 2005;Gabriel & Mellenberger, 2004;Hamilton, 1988). A consequence of the tendency to employ masculine forms to refer to people in general (e.g.,"to each his own"), is that when the generic masculine is used, people are overwhelmingly more likely to think of men than women, to the extent that even professions typically perceived as female, such as beautician, may be interpreted as male ; for review, see Stahlberg, Braun, Irmen, & Sczesny, 2007). 2 On the other hand, avoiding masculine generics and explicitly marking roles for gender by means of feminine-masculine word pairs (e.g., German Geschäftsführerin/Geschäftsführer, "CEO, fem./CEO, masc.") ...
Power, Gender, and Individual Differences in Spatial Metaphor: The Role of Perceptual Stereotypes and Language Statistics
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  • Jul 2020
English speakers use vertical language to talk about power, such as when speaking of people being “at the bottom of the social hierarchy” or “rising to the top.” Experimental research has shown that people automatically associate higher spatial positions with more powerful social groups, such as doctors and army generals, compared to lower spatial positions, which are associated with relatively less powerful groups, such as nurses and soldiers. However, power as a social dimension is also associated with gender. Here, by means of a reaction-time study and a corpus study, we show that professions that display greater gender asymmetries, such as doctor/nurse, exhibit stronger vertical associations. Moreover, we show that people’s perception of vertical metaphors for power depends on their own gender, with male participants having stronger vertical biases than female participants, which we propose is due to the fact that men are more prone to thinking about power in bodily terms, and to associate it with physical dominance. Our results provide clear evidence for individual differences in metaphor comprehension, thus demonstrating empirically that the same metaphor is understood differently by different people.
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Examining the Glottal Stop as a Mark of Gender-Inclusive Language
Preprint
  • Dec 2022
Grammatical gender form influences readers’ mental gender representations. Previous research demonstrates that the generic masculine form leads to male-biased representations, while some alternative forms lead to female-biased representations. The present research examines the increasingly used glottal stop form in spoken language in German, where a glottal stop (similar to a short pause), meant to represent all gender identities, is inserted before the gender-specific ending. In two experiments (total N = 1188), participants listened to sentences in the glottal stop, the generic masculine, or the generic feminine form and classified whether a second sentence about women or men was a sensible continuation. As expected, the generic feminine and the glottal stop led to female biases (fewer errors in sentences about women vs. men) and the generic masculine led to a male bias. The biases for the glottal stop and the generic masculine were smaller than for the generic feminine, indicating that the former two are more readily understood as representing both women and men.
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Are People Prejudiced Against Women? Some Answers From Research on Attitudes, Gender Stereotypes, and Judgments of Competence
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In contemporary research, attitudes toward women appear to be more positive than those toward men in samples of US and Canadian university students, and the evaluative content of the female stereotype is more favorable than the evaluative content of the male stereotype. These research findings on attitudes and stereotypes are compared with the findings of Goldberg-paradigm experiments on judgments of women's and men's competence, which are commonly thought to reflect people's attitudes and stereotypes. Although research on competence judgments has not shown a pervasive tendency to devalue women's work, it has demonstrated prejudice against women in masculine domains (e.g. male-dominated jobs, male-stereotypic behavior). This targeted form of prejudice is consistent with the generally more favorable evaluation of women than men obtained in attitude and stereotype studies because this positive evaluation derives primarily from the ascription to women of nice, nurturant, communal characteristics, which people think qualify individuals for the domestic role as well as for low-status, low-paying female-dominated jobs. Women's experiences of gender discrimination and feminist protests concerning a contemporary backlash against women reflect women's inroads into traditionally masculine arenas, especially their efforts to gain access to high-status, high-paying male-dominated jobs, which are thought to require characteristics stereotypically ascribed to men.
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Personenbezeichnungsmodelle auf demPrüfstand
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Zusammenfassung. In zwei experimentellen Studien wurden anhand von langeren Texten die Thesen der Feministischen Linguistik uberpruft, dass (1) das “generische“ Maskulinum zu einer “Benachteiligung“ von Frauen im Denken der SprachbenutzerInnen fuhrt, was (2) durch sprachliche “Heilungs“varianten aufgehoben werden kann. In Studie 1 resultierte in einem sexuskonkretisierenden, Assoziationen an Manner auslosenden Kontext (Budapester Bader) bei 220 Vpn sowohl fur das “generische“ Maskulinum als auch fur “Heilungs“varianten ein geschlechterasymmetrisches Denken (mit Ubergewicht der Manner-Referenz). Beim Wechsel auf den Kontext “Erlebnisbader in Deutschland“ in Studie 2 (N = 194) bestand diese Wirkung des durchgangig verwendeten “generischen“ Maskulinums fort, wahrend dessen partielle und vollstandige Ersetzung durch die “Heilungs“varianten ‘Paarform‘ sowie deren Kombination mit dem Nomen ‘Person‘ geschlechtersymmetrische Assoziationen zur Folge hatte; das Versalien-I fuhrte zu einem asymmetrischen Denken mit ...
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  • Jul 2001
Zusammenfassung. In der feministischen Linguistik wird angenommen, das maskuline Bezeichnungen, die generisch benutzt werden (Bezeichnungen von Personen beiderlei Geschlechts durch die maskuline Form, wie z.B. die Wissenschaftler, die Studenten), weibliche Personen weniger vorstellbar oder sichtbar machen als mannliche Personen. Verschiedene experimentelle Untersuchungen konnten diese Annahme fur den englischen Sprachraum bestatigen. Fur die deutsche Sprache existieren dagegen bislang sehr wenige Studien zu dieser Frage. Es werden vier Experimente vorgestellt, die untersuchen, ob unterschiedliche Sprachversionen - ,Beidnennung‘ (Studentinnen und Studenten), ,Neutral‘ (Studierende), ,Generisches Maskulinum‘ (Studenten) und “Groses I“ (StudentInnen) - den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen beeinflussen. Uber alle Experimente hinweg zeigte sich, das bei Personenreferenzen im generischen Maskulinum ein geringerer gedanklicher Einbezug von Frauen zu beobachten war als bei alternativen Sprachformen wie der Beidne...
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Automatic gender-specific associations to texts containing gender-specific and masculine generic text-subjects
Article
  • Jan 1998
Two experiments (N=48 each) were conducted to investigate gender-specific elements in the mental representation of short German texts. The texts contained a specific male or female designator (e.g., Mr. Smith, Mrs. Meyer) or a masculine generic phrase (CM) in either singular or plural usage (e.g., the student, the students) as text-subject. Two testphrases were constructed for each text, which did not appear in the text but reflected a masculine or feminine understanding of the text. Gender-specific associations were measured via the time that was required to reject the masculine and feminine test-distractors in a subsequent recognition task. Reading the texts with a specific male or female designator as text-subject increased the rejection time for the gender-congruent testphrases. For texts containing a GM as text-subject, the pattern of gender-specific associations was dependent on the grammatical numberof the GM-phrase. Reading a scenario containing a GM in the singular increased rejection times for the masculine test-phrases, while reading a scenario with a GM in the plural increased rejection times for the feminine test-phrases.
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Zusammenfassung: Die vorliegende Untersuchung pruft, ob sogenannte “generisch” (d.h. in geschlechtsneutralem Sinne verwendete) maskuline Sprachformen dazu fuhren, dass Personen geschlechtsausgewogen mental reprasentiert werden. Unter dem Vorwand einer Untersuchung zur Kreativitat wurden 150 studentischen Versuchspersonen schriftlich Satze vorgegeben, die eine Personenbezeichnung im Plural in verschiedenen Sprachformen (generisches Maskulinum, Binnen-I, Schragstrich-Schreibweise) als Satzsubjekt enthielten. Die Versuchspersonen sollten kurze Geschichten uber die bezeichneten Personen schreiben und diese Personen dabei auch namentlich benennen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass generisch maskuline Formen zu mehr Reprasentationen mannlicher Personen fuhrten als die sprachlichen Alternativen. Eine Gleichverteilung mannlicher und weiblicher Reprasentationen trat ausschlieslich bei der Verwendung der Schragstrich-Schreibweise auf, wohingegen das generische Maskulinum zu einem hoheren Anteil reprasentierter Manner, di...
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