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Name your favorite musician: Effects of masculine generics and of their alternatives in German

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Feminist linguists claim that masculine forms used in a generic sense (e.g. he referring to a doctor irrespective of sex) facilitate the cognitive representation of men compared to women and make women less visible. A number of experimental studies have confirmed this assumption with regard to the English language. Concerning other languages, however, this question has been addressed only in very few studies, although gender is a much more pervasive grammatical category and masculine generics are more prominent in languages such as French, Spanish or German. This paper reports three experiments with native speakers of German which were conducted to determine the influence of different types of German generics on the cognitive inclusion of women. Results indicate that inclusion of women is higher with 'non-sexist' alternatives than with masculine generics, a tendency which was consistent over studies. But the different alternative forms show different effects which also vary depending on the context. These results are discussed with regard to their practical consequences in situations such as nominating women and men for awards, political offices etc.
... Even though feminization increases women's visibility, and hence creates more diverse mental images to whom individuals referred (Stahlberg et al., 2001), previous research is inconclusive regarding whether paired forms can eliminate the male bias . What is more, while neutralization helps avoid male bias and therefore indirectly takes into account all genders, feminization does not solve the problem with the exclusion of non-binary people. ...
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Gender bias has become one of the central issues analysed within natural language processing (NLP) research. A main concerns in this field relates to the fact that many NLP tools and automatic machine learning systems not only reflect, but also reinforce social disparities, including those related to gender, and language technology is one of the areas in which this issue is pronounced. This paper analyses the problem of gender-neutral language use from the standpoint of gender bias in machine translation (MT). We determine which types of harms can be caused by the failure to reflect gender-neutral language in translation, provide the general definition of gender bias in MT, describe its sources and provide an overview of existing mitigating strategies. One of the main contributions of this work is that it focuses not only on females, but also non-binary people, whose linguistic visibility has been receiving only limited attention from academia. This literature review provides a firm foundation for further research in this area aimed at addressing the problem of gender bias in machine translation, especially bias linked to representational harms.
... Ivanov et al. 2018: 267), die dazu führt, dass bei der geschlechtsübergreifenden Verwendung maskuliner Personenbezeichnungen eher an Männer gedacht wird. Mehrere psycholinguistische Studien haben dies inzwischen belegt (siehe Braun et al. 1998;Stahlberg et al. 2001;Gygax et al. 2008Gygax et al. , 2021. ...
... This study adds a novel experimental method to the existing literature on grammatically gendered languages, processing and perception, as well as speech production. Typically, the existing literature has focused on sentence-evaluation paradigms [see 3] and linguistic expression of gender paradigms [see 25]. In this study, we borrow approaches from speech perception and speech production paradigms to explore the way G-gender is processed and produced in Arabic. ...
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The default use of masculine morphology to refer to all genders in Arabic-speaking countries is largely unquestioned and widely accepted. However, research on masculine generic morphology in other gender-marked languages has shown that this can create an over-representation of men and a male-bias in perception. Given the extensive use of default masculine grammatical gender in the context of job recruitment, education, and formal communication where women are typically underrepresented and men overrepresented, this widely accepted notion needs to be investigated. The primary aim of this research is to understand how grammatical gender in Arabic mediates occupational expectations based on the language currently used in job recruitment in Arabic speaking countries. Specifically, the study explores how the use of default masculine grammatical gender can create a male-bias in perception. The secondary aim of this research is to test whether gender-inclusive language can reduce this male-bias in perception and instead increase the accessibility, activation, and retrieval of exemplars related to other gender minorities (i.e., reduce male-bias in perception). This is achieved through a novel prompted speech production experiment, based on an adaptation of the popular board game ’Taboo’ where participants are asked to describe role nouns presented (e.g., doctor or nurse) in different language conditions.
... Since then, however, her efforts to challenge non-inclusive language in everyday bureaucracy have been less successful. 1 While few citizens challenge their gender classification as Krämer has done, language is an important feature of our everyday lives that allows us to communicate and interact with the social world around us. Since the first academic critiques of masculine generics were made (e.g., Trömel-Plötz, 1978;Pusch, 1979;Silveria, 1980), many scholars have investigated the male bias of the generic masculine, that is, that the mental representations evoked upon hearing a generic masculine term tend to be male, rather than female or neutral (Stahlberg, Sczesny and Braun, 2001; Irmen, 2 WALDENDORF Only a few years ago, a leading expert on GIL, Professor Gabriele Diewald, stated in an interview: 'It will take a long time for gender to become part of everyday language' (own translation) (Olderdissen, 2019). This statement mirrors the existing empirical research on the prevalence of GIL: there is an increase in GIL, but it remains a marginal phenomenon (Adler and Hansen, 2020;Krome, 2020Krome, , 2021. ...
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Everyday observations seem to indicate an increase in gender-inclusive language (GIL) in Germany; however, previous research on the prevalence of GIL suggests that it is a marginal phenomenon. Moreover, from a theoretical side, an increase in GIL seems unlikely because of the cognitive challenge language change holds, the existence of multiple GIL variants, and the antagonistic environment that Germany poses for language change. This study empirically measures the use of GIL in five media sources in Germany. Over four million articles from 2000 to 2021 are analysed using the IDS Deutscher Referenzkorpus (DeReKo), supplemented by an in-depth analysis of 500 newspaper articles scraped in 2021. A fine-grained analysis along the dimensions of political orientation of the outlet, type of GIL, and author’s gender is conducted. In addition to observing an unexpectedly rapid increase in GIL, two different trends are identified: whilst non-binary inclusive forms of GIL are increasingly used in the left-leaning newspaper, GIL that adheres to a binary notion of gender is favoured in the mainstream and right-leaning media. This sheds light on how difficult behavioural change can occur.
... Otros estudios (Crawford & English, 1984;Jacobson & Insko, 1985;Stahlberg, Sczesny & Braun, 2001) han mostrado que, cuando se intenta elicitar, con masculino genérico, el nombre de especialistas (médicos o médicas, biólogas o biólogos, músicas o músicos) o personajes literarios, los informantes (y las informantes también) tienden a recordar varones, lo que patentiza el sesgo de la interpretación del masculino morfológico en favor del masculino específico. En alguna medida, Bourdieu confirma esto desde su mirada sociológica: "la fuerza del orden masculino se ve en el hecho de que no hay necesidad de justificación: la visión androcéntrica se impone como neutral y no necesita ser expresada en discursos destinados a legitimarla" (Bourdieu,1998, p. 22). ...
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En los últimos años, tanto en español como en otras lenguas, se ha generado un debate sobre el sexismo en el lenguaje, en particular cuando el masculino morfológico en su valor no marcado alude a seres sexuados. Sin embargo, no es esa la única manifestación del sexismo en el lenguaje. Tras realizar una revisión bibliográfica, en este trabajo se analizan críticamente seis ejemplos distintos de sexismo sutil en el lenguaje español: el empleo de supuestos neutros, sintagmas que reproducen estereotipos, algunas definiciones de diccionario, el uso en masculino del cargo de las mujeres, la contravención de normas discursivas protocolares y el tratamiento asimétrico de hombres y mujeres. Con todo, se advierte que la eliminación de esos usos (o su inexistencia en algunas lenguas) no entraña, per se, la igualdad de los derechos de género en la sociedad.
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Nonbinary people face invisibility and misrecognition. This research investigated how the use of the Swedish gender-inclusive neopronoun hen influenced the gender categorization of faces beyond the binary. In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 368) were instructed to use the gender-inclusive neopronoun hen, the binary masculine pronoun han (he), or no pronoun in a writing task. Then, they categorized androgynous morphed faces by selecting one of four response options (“woman,” “man,” “nonbinary,” or “I don't know”). Altogether, the results indicated that few participants responded “I don't know,” indicating that categorizing gender by appearance is common. As expected, the use of the gender-inclusive pronoun increased nonbinary categorizations, whereas the use of the masculine pronoun did not increase man categorizations, documenting that gender-inclusive pronouns increase the visibility of nonbinary people. Gender binary beliefs were associated with less nonbinary categorization. The discussion outlines how these findings can inform social policymaking.
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In gender-marked languages, masculine and feminine grammatical forms are distinct, with the masculine form also used for gender-mixed groups (generic masculine). Previous research indicates that the generic masculine elicits male-biased representations. Psychologically, this may be due to a misunderstanding of the communicative intention, an automatic activation of male associations, or both. In two preregistered experiments, we tested whether the male bias is affected by emphasizing the generic intention. Adding contextual information that conveyed a group's gender-mixed composition eliminated the male bias (Study 1). However, the male bias remained robust when continuously reminding participants of the generic intention via a novel grammatical marker (Study 2). These results suggest that the male bias is partly driven by associative processes that are immune against a purely explicit disambiguation of the generic intention.
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Gender-fair language (GFL) is currently a widely debated topic in the German-speaking context, yet research on the subject is rather scarce with limited comparative data for the three largest German-speaking countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The present study seeks to address this research gap with a corpus-based analysis of the use of different forms of GFL over the last two decades in these three countries. Given that the language used by journalists reaches a vast target audience, the corpus for this study consists of some of the most widely circulated and politically diverse daily newspapers in the three countries. The results of the study not only show differences in the frequency of GFL in the three countries, with Austria using GFL most frequently, but also indicate a diverging usage trend from 2021 onwards and variations in the strategies of GFL used. Furthermore, the political orientation of the selected newspapers is not predictive of the frequency of GFL and the strategies used.
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In German, symmetrical treatment of women and men through gender-fair language is well established and the use of feminine forms is evaluated positively. In the present study (N = 331), we examined the mechanisms behind this positive evaluation. Female job applicants were evaluated as more linguistically competent and as more competent in general, which translated into more favorable hiring decisions when using a feminine (vs. a masculine) job title. These results illuminate positive effects of successful language reform for women.
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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 recently introduced 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. 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 were smaller for the glottal stop and the generic masculine than for the generic feminine, indicating that the former two are more readily understood as representing both women and men.
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A naturalistic experiment investigated the effects of language reforms on several aspects of thought. Half of the students in an introductory psychology class received corrections any time they used "he" as a generic pronoun in their written work; the other half received no corrections to their written language use. At the end of the semester, all students completed measures of their language use, their gender imagery, and their attitudes to-ward language reforms. Results showed that the language corrections did reduce students' subsequent use of gender-biased language but did not affect their imagery nor their attitudes toward language reforms. Additional results revealed thatgender imagery was related to the gender connotations of the language encountered in the imagery task, especially for female students, and to language use for students who did not receive corrections. Implications of these results for the debate about the masculine generic prescription are discussed.
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Terms such as "his," "he," and "man" refer to males but are also used as putative gender-neutral terms to refer to persons of unspecified sex. It is argued that male terms sometimes fail to be gender-neutral and may therefore be a cause of sex bias as well as a vestige of past inequality. In an experiment with 226 male and 264 female college students on the interpretation of pronouns, male terms such as "his," even in explicitly gender-neutral contexts, caused Ss to think 1st of males significantly more often than did "his or her" appearing in the same place. It is concluded that male terms can fail to be gender-neutral even when it is clear that a person of either sex is referred to, and males may have an advantage in contexts where they are referred to by a putative neutral term. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)