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Christiane Kaufmann & Gerd Bohner
M
asculine Generics and Gender-aware Alternatives in
Spanish
1
Feminist linguistics have established that the use of masculine generics (MG), i.e. linguistic
forms that are used sex-specically in reference to men and generically in reference to
mixed groups, leads perceivers to over-represent the men in their mental representation of
people. We review empirical research on MG and summarize an experiment we conducted
on eects of MG in Spanish. In that experiment, 195 participants read short stories in
which groups of people were referred to with either MG or one of two gender-aware
alternative forms. en participants gave names to the stories‘ protagonists, which we used
as indicators of their mental gender representation. Analyses showed that MG evoked a
male bias in this task, and that the alternative forms alleviated this bias. More implicit
gender associations, which we additionally assessed with a word-fragment completion
task, showed no clear eect of language form. Ambivalent sexism and attitudes toward
gender-aware language did not aect any of the dependent variables. In discussing the
results, we present recommendations for gender-fair language use and develop ideas for
further research.
Masculine Generics and Gender-aware Alternatives in Spanish
Gender inequality is a phenomenon that can be observed in societies throughout the
world. e Global Gender Gap Index 2013 of the World Economic Forum (Hausmann,
Tyson, Bekhouche, & Zahidi, 2013) quanties the magnitude of gender-based disparities
in political, economical, educational, and health-related criteria, and none of the 136
countries examined reached gender equality. According to the World Health Organisation
(WHO), being a woman is a main health risk factor worldwide (García-Moreno, Jansen,
Ellsberg, Heise, & Watts, 2005). How these disparities are caused and how they can be
tackled are complex questions that touch upon many dierent aspects of human history,
culture, politics, and more. One causal factor may be the constitutive role of language.
Feminist writers have conceptualized language as a principal element for the stabilization
of social conditions as well as an active means for emancipatory transformation and change
(for a review and discussion, see Butler, 1990, especially chapter 1.VI). Concerning
gender, this means that, on the one hand, language may represent, reproduce, and
reinforce the status quo of gender relations in society, but, on the other hand, may also be
used as an instrument of conscientization and change.
Representation of Gender in Language
In order to talk about the representation of gender in languages, we rst need to clarify
some terms. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “gender” refers to the cultural
and social traits typically associated with one sex, whereas the term “sex” refers to biological
aspects. We consider both sex and gender to be social constructs and neither determined
nor determining categories (for a detailed argumentation, see Voß, 2010). In this text,
we only employ the term “gender”, because we are interested in social roles and not in
biological parts. For the same reason, when talking about “women” and “men” as well as
“female” and “male,” we also refer to gender, not to sex.
1 e reported research was facilitated by the International Oce of the University of Bielefeld with a travel
grant within the PROMOS project of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and by the
laboratory of social psychology of the Ponticia Universidad Católica de Chile by providing a workplace and
material to the rst author. e authors would like to thank Roberto González Gutiérrez for his support and
cooperation, Pietro Montagna Letelier and Pablo Torres Irribarra for their help in data collection, Viviana
Sagredo Ormazabal for her help and advice, and Benjamin Liersch for providing the software to generate
experimental stimuli
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In all language systems, the genders are represented somehow. According to
Stahlberg, Braun, Irmen, and Sczesny (2007), the variation of structural dierences
between languages concerning their representation of the genders can be distinguished
into three main language types: Grammatical gender languages, natural gender languages
and genderless languages. In the grammatical gender languages (GGL), such as German,
Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and others, gender is coded as a grammatical category: Every
noun is either feminine or masculine (or neuter in some languages), and nearly all personal
nouns, adjectives, and pronouns carry gender markers, so that reference to gender is very
frequent. (An example in Spanish: “Una trabajadora francesa fue la mas simpatica del
grupo de voluntarios.”) In natural gender languages (NGL) like English or Scandinavian
languages there is no grammatical marking of gender in nouns, and most personal nouns
refer to both genders (e.g., English: “student”, “neighbour”, “doctor”), whereas personal
pronouns reect the gender of human beings (e.g., English: “Every student wants to give
his/her best.”). ere are also languages without grammatical gender at all, neither in the
noun system nor in personal pronouns. Gender is only expressed by lexical means (e.g.,
in words like Turkish “erkek” = “man, male” or “kız” = “girl”). ese languages are called
genderless languages (GL) and include Turkish, Finnish, Iranian, Chinese, Swahili, and
others. In spite of these structural dierences, it is not the language type that makes a
language more or less sexist or egalitarian. As Stahlberg et al. (2007) point out: “However,
expressing or concealing sex in language is not in itself sexist or non-sexist. e decisive
question is whether references to sex are symmetrical (…)” (p. 167, emphasis ours), which
means that the genders are treated linguistically equally. In fact, asymmetries regarding
gender references are found in all three language types.
An example for these asymmetries is the markedness of female/feminine forms.
As we see, for example, in the German words for male teachers “Lehrer” and female
teachers “Lehrerinnen”, the female form has an additional sux to the male form, is
longer and more complex. is kind of suxes, which can be found in each language
type, mark femaleness as a deviation from a male norm. ere are many other forms of
asymmetries in language structure. Probably the most systematic type of asymmetries are
masculine generics (MG). In the words of Stahlberg et al. (2007), MG are “linguistic
forms with a double function: ey are used sex-specically in reference to male persons
and generically in reference to mixed groups and to people whose sex is unknown or
irrelevant” (p. 169). Examples from the three language types would be, for Spanish
(GGL): “los estudiantes” = the students, referring to groups of men as well as to mixed
groups; for English (NGL): “Everyone should take responsibility for his life”; and for
Turkish (GL): “adam” means both “man” and “human being”). Forms of MG can also be
found in each language type, but GGLs have the highest frequency of MG as they have
the most gender-referring forms. e use, impact, and reform of MG have always been a
main issue of feminist language critique and its opponents.
Debate on Feminist Language Critique
Already in 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton criticized the use of masculine generic pronouns
as a symbol of oppression of women and recommended using the neutral pronoun “they”
to prevent misunderstandings. Since then, linguists, sociologists, psychologists, and
political activists have joined the debate with many dierent opinions and explications.
Altogether, two main argumentation lines can be identied. Feminist language critique
claims that the use of MG makes women and women‘s rights, interests, and achievements
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Kaufmann, Bohner Gender(-un)-aware Language
invisible, and supports a fundamentally androcentrist view of the world, in which the
male is depicted as the norm and the female as deviant. Representatives of this point
of view are Luise Pusch (1980) and Senta Trömel-Plötz (1982) regarding the German
language, and Robin Lako (1973) regarding US English. e opponent position argues
that MG forms are unrelated to gender and purely grammatical. Existing disparities are
regarded as caused by social conditions and impervious to being inuenced or changed by
language. is position is described in Martyna (1980) and Blaubergs (1980) for English,
and in Burkhardt (1985) for German. A brief but enlightening outline of the positions
and their representatives is given in Stahlberg et al. (2007).
ere is less literature on this topic for Spanish, but the opponent positions are
basically the same. Jiménez, Román, and Traverso (2011) see language as representing and
constructing social realities and as an important element on the way to gender equality,
whereas the Real Academia Española (RAE) – the highest authority in language questions
in the Spanish-speaking world – states that MG are purely arbitrary and grammatical,
and that innovative forms are unnecessary and even ridiculous (RAE, 2006). We took this
situation as the starting point for studying empirically the eects of MG and alternative
language forms in Spanish. Before describing our own research, we briey review existing
research on other languages.
Empirical Research on Masculine Generics
Along with the theoretical debate on MG and sexist language there has also been
some empirical research, mostly supporting the MG-critical position. In most of the
experiments on the eects of MG, generic sentences or texts were presented in several
versions: one version using MG and one or more versions using alternative language
forms (e.g., masculine/feminine slash forms or innovative forms like the feminine form
with uppercase “I” in German plural nouns). en, dierent methods were used to
capture participants‘ mental representations of gender concerning the persons the texts
referred to. Heise (2000), for example, asked German-speaking participants to write a
short story based on the sentences presented before, and to give names to the protagonists,
under the pretext of conducting a study on creativity. Results showed that the MG
personal nouns (e.g., “Vegetarier”) evoked signicantly more male names than female
ones, whereas a male/female splitting form (e.g., “Vegetarier/innen”) led participants to
produce a balanced number of male and female names. ere was also a condition with
gender-neutral nouns (e.g., “Kinder”), which evoked a male bias comparable to the MG
form. e uppercase “I” (e.g., “VegetarierInnen”) evoked a female bias in the names that
participants produced.
In other studies, participants were asked to draw or select pictures of the
protagonists in the texts (Sniezek & Jazwinski, 1986), complete sentences (Scheele &
Gauler, 1993), or guess the ratio of women in a group (Braun, Gottburgsen, Sczesny, &
Stahlberg, 1998). More recently, researchers have also used more implicit measures like
reaction times for answering questions, reading texts or other types of processing. For
example, Irmen and Roßberg (2004) presented sentences in MG form and measured
reading times for the following sentence, in which the gender of the persons referred
to either did or did not match the grammatical gender of the preceding sentence. An
implicit inuence was found with reading times being higher when the protagonists of a
text did not match the grammatical gender than when they did.
Findings were quite consistent in showing that MG evoke a male bias in the
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cognitive representation of the genders, and that this bias may be weakened by the use
of gender-aware linguistic forms. In some studies, neutralizing forms (like the pronoun
“they”, “individual”, etc.) showed similar eects to MG (e.g., Heise, 2000), in others
they weakened the male bias in a similar way as did other gender-aware forms (e.g.,
Stahlberg & Sczesny, 2001, Experiment 1; Gastil, 1990). It has been argued that the eect
of neutral forms may be especially context-sensitive (Stahlberg et al., 2007). In many
studies, a main eect of participant‘s gender could be found, in that women generally
formed more female associations than men did (Hamilton, 1988; Stahlberg et al., 2001;
among others).
Most of the empirical research on the inuence of MG language versus gender-
aware alternative forms examined English or German-speaking samples. ere are very
few studies on French (Gygax & Gabriel, 2008; Gygax et al., 2012), some that include
data on Dutch (Backer, De Maarten, Cuypere, & Ludovic, 2012), on Norwegian
(Gabriel & Gygax, 2008), and some comparing several languages (Gygax, Gabriel,
Sarrasin, Oakhill, & Garnham, 2008; Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, & Oakhill, 2009), most
of them supporting the ndings of studies on German and English. However, checking
international publication databases we could not nd any empirical study on the eects
of gender-aware versus -unaware language forms in Spanish.
It was plausible to expect that the general pattern of ndings obtained with
other GGL would also apply to Spanish. Like the uppercase “I”, which is specic to
German, the Spanish language also has specic forms to avoid MG. One innovative and
rather unconventional form is the @-form (e.g. “l@s estudiantes”). e @ is supposed
to visually combine the letters o (indicating masculinity) and a (indicating feminity).
However, it is probably more easily read as an “a”, so this form may be similar to the
German uppercase “I” in that it emphasizes the feminine. A disadvantage of the @-form
is that it is not applicable in some grammatical cases. For example, the MG form of “the
Spanish” is “los españoles”, the feminine form is “las españolas”, so it would not be logical
to use “l@s español@s” in this case. Apart from that, this form is not applicable in spoken
language, because there is no practical way to pronounce the “@”.
Another innovative form, which is less used and known, is the X-form (e.g. “lxs
estudiantes”, “lxs españolxs”). is form is not pronounceable either, but consistently
applicable in written language. e X-form is mostly found in left-wing feminist political
contexts, representing a more radical form than the slash form, and also symbolizes a
rejection of the normative binary sex and gender system of society (for more theoretical
background to this critique, see Butler, 1990). e recommended form in formal
guidelines on gender-fair language (Bernal Castro, 2007) is the slash form (e.g. “los/las
estudiantes”).
Our Research on Gender(-un)-aware Language in Spanish
In a recent experiment with a Chilean sample, we compared eects of the X-form and the
slash form both to each other and to those of the conventional MG form, using Heise‘s
short-story-paradigm. 195 Chilean university students (83 women, 112 men) with a
mean age of 20 years read the beginnings of two short stories about a group of people that
were written either in MG form, slash form or X-form (e.g. “El grupo de tres amigxs se
encuentra en su bar favorito.” = “e group of three friends meets in their favourite bar.”).
ey were asked to write a continuation of two to three sentences for each story and to
give names to the protagonists. ese chosen names‘ gender distribution was used as a
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measure of participants‘ gender associations concerning the protagonists.
We expected that the MG form would evoke a male bias in the names‘ gender
distribution by evoking more than 50% male names. We further expected that the
alternative language forms would evoke fewer male names than would the MG form. In
reference to the ndings of Heise (2000), the slash form was expected to evoke roughly
50% male and 50% female names.
Mental Representation of Gender – Main Findings
Our results showed that MG language does evoke a male bias in gender representation,
and that the alternative language forms slash and X both do alleviate this bias. An even
stronger inuence on the gender representation was evoked by participant‘s own gender,
in the way that men generally had a stronger male bias than women. Hamilton (1988)
suggested that this could be an eect of a projection of self into the stimulus sentences.
However, Silveira (1980) had proposed the hypothesis of a “people = male bias” for both
men and women. It claimed that a man is more likely perceived as a person than is a
woman, and a person is more likely believed to be a man than a woman. Hamilton
(1991) provided clear evidence for this hypothesis with several experiments. He showed,
for example, that participants would be more likely to use gender non-specic terms like
“person” or “individual” when referring back to a man than when referring back to a
woman. Silveira (1980) argued that men‘s greater bias derives from having learnt as a boy
that “the words which refer to himself and which exclude his opposites also refer to people
in general”, so generic “he” would rather be male than female, whereas girls learn that
“words that refer to [their] opposites, [their] not-selves, also refer to people in general” (p.
175). She assumes that girls, in order to compensate for this dissonance, develop strategies
to suppress male imagery from MG, whereas boys do not.
Regarding the eects of alternative language forms, our results show that the
slash form was closest to 50% male and female names, at least among women. In the
male subsample, the slash form also raised the number of female names that participants
produced, but did not evoke a 50% equality. Apparently, the gender eect described
above is stronger than the eect of the slash form in the male subsample.
Interestingly, the X-form had no signicant eect on men, but evoked 50%
female names in the female subsample, almost like the slash form. is is not just explicable
by the gender eect. From a purely formal perspective, “X” is a neutral letter, neither in
its shape nor in its sound does it resemble the masculine-marking “O” or of the feminine-
marking “A” (unlike, for example, the “@”, which reminds readers of the feminine word
form in shape and sound, and might evoke a female bias). Silveira (1980) argues that
women, having developed strategies to suppress male imagery from MG, tend to have less
people=male bias and less people=self bias than men, so that could be a reason why they
interpret the X-form truly generically, whereas male participants, having a stronger people
= male bias and people=self bias, tend toward male imagery. e slash form, however,
succeeds in weakening this bias even for male readers because it makes the feminine form
explicit. Another consideration is that the X has a slightly aggressive character because it
questions gender quite oensively. Wherever gender concepts are critically questioned,
the male privileges in a patriarchal system are threatened. e X-form could therefore
provoke reactance in male readers, leading them to reject this language form, and to
react by (consciously or unconsciously) choosing fewer female names than in the slash
condition.
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Implicit Aspects of Gender Representation
In most of the research on the eects of language form done so far, rather explicit
measures were used to capture participants‘ cognitive representations: Writing stories,
answering questions, drawing pictures, etc. are conscious processes, and it is possible that
participants answer in a socially or politically reected way. It would thus be of interest to
use more implicit measures in order to nd out about the eects of language forms on a
less conscious level. In a dierent context, Bohner et al. (1998) had used ambiguous word
fragments that could be completed either in a gender-related or in a neutral fashion, to
detect the cognitive accessibility of the gender concept.
According to feminist language critique, MG represent a socially dominating
male norm. Alternative language forms break with this norm and point out the dissonance
between the usual MG word form and the actual gender of the persons referred to. It is
probable that this draws attention to gender ratio and gender in general. If that is the
case, we may assume that alternative language forms increase the cognitive accessibility
of the gender concept compared to the MG form. More specically, these forms may
increase the relative accessibility of the concept of femininity (vs. masculinity). Based
on these considerations, we also employed an implicit measure of construct accessibility
by using ambiguous word fragments in the above-mentioned experiment in Chile. After
having read sentences in MG form, slash form or X-form, respectively, participants were
asked to complete, as quickly as possible, word fragments that had more than one possible
solution. For example, the fragment “H__J__” could be completed as HIJO (son), HIJA
(daughter), or HOJA (leaf). e completions made by participants were later classied
as “masculine”, “feminine”, or “neutral” completions. A higher number of “feminine” or
“masculine” completions was supposed to indicate a higher instantaneous accessibility of
the concept of gender.
Unfortunately, our analyses showed that the word fragment measure did not full
conventional standards of reliability. Although we did nd a small eect of participant‘s
gender, with female participants producing more feminine word completions than male
participants, there was no clear eect of language form.
Despite this, we are condent that the method of word completions could work
as an implicit measure in future research. In the case of this rst study, the method may just
not have been sensitive enough. is may be because we used a relatively small number of
stimuli and did not control for the frequency of use of the possible solutions. Although
it is dicult to construct word fragments with gender-specic and neutral solutions that
are equally frequent, this aspect should be explicitly addressed in the construction of
future implicit measures. Furthermore, in future analyses the word completions should
be weighted according to their word frequency.
Another idea is to use fragments of names that can be completed both to a male
and to a female name, instead of (or in addition to) abstract terms or objects. us, the
possible completions would probably be more equally frequent, and they might reect
more closely the cognitive representations of people. With this method it would not
be possible to capture a general concept of gender, but more specic representations of
femininity and masculinity. In any case, we believe that further research on the impact
of language form on an implicit level would be of great interest, and other implicit
measures, such as ambivalent pictures or eye-tracking experiments, could be useful. For
an overview on implicit measures, their underlying theoretical rationales and advice on
implementation in research, see Wittenbrink and Schwarz (2007).
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e Inuence of Sexist Attitudes
Finally, one could assume that participants‘ level of sexism as well as their attitudes toward
MG and alternative language forms could aect the results. ere are dierent measures
of sexism. An internationally validated measure based on a theoretically profound concept
is the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory by Glick and Fiske (1996). Having recognized that
a uni-dimensional approach to sexism cannot capture its subtle and complex dierent
aspects, they constructed a measure with two positively correlated subscales: hostile
sexism (HS), representing an antipathy against women (and especially those women who
do not conform to traditional roles), and benevolent sexism (BS), capturing more subtle,
and seemingly positive, stereotypical attitudes toward women, which are nonetheless
sexist because they restrict women to certain roles and images, and contribute to keeping
women subordinated. Both aspects of sexism go together and the two subscales HS
and BS form a general measure of ambivalent sexism (AS). Attitudes toward gender-
aware language (AL) are a less commonly used measure, quantifying a person‘s liking for
innovative language forms regarding gender-relations and their consciousness for gender
inequalities in language.
In the Chilean experiment, both AS and AL were reliably assessed, but none of
them was associated with the representation of female and male protagonists, nor did it
moderate the eects of gender(-un)-aware language on those representations. It therefore
seems that the eect of language form may be quite independent of people‘s personal
attitudes. is could be interpreted as being in line with the position of feminist language
critique that the male bias evoked by MG emerges because MG are often interpreted in
a sex-specic way, in spite of people knowing that they are generic (for further evidence,
see Gygax et al., 2009).
Conclusion
Our recent experiment on Chilean Spanish replicates previous ndings that MG language
evokes a male bias in gender representation, and that alternative language forms weaken this
bias. A strong gender eect was found, too. On the implicit measure, participant‘s gender
evoked a small eect, whereas language form did not. However, the operationalization
of this measure was not suciently reliable to draw rm conclusions yet. Sexism and
language-related attitudes, despite being measured reliably, did neither directly aect our
gender representation measures, nor did they moderate any of the observed eects.
Based on these results and the preceding studies on other languages, we would
strongly recommend the conscious and consistent use of gender-aware language in every
possible context. In Spanish, the slash form seems to be the form that comes closest to
an equal representation of the genders, so it is the recommendable form in most cases.
e X-form had evoked similar eects, but only in the female subsample. According to
Silveira’s (1980) argumentation (see above, “Mental Representation of Gender - Main
Findings”), women interpret the X-form truly generically, because they have less of a
people=male bias and less of a people=self bias than men do. It would be interesting to
nd out if people who are generally more aware of the issue of gender representation in
language and reect their own position in the gender-system more consciously would
show smaller people=male and people=self biases than average. If so, the X-form might be
more appropriate in those contexts.
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Concerning further research questions, we would like to point out that there is very little
research on eects of MG other than on cognitive representations. Two experiments by
Vervecken and Hannover (2012) showed that speakers who used gender-balanced forms
in German were perceived to be more competent and less sexist by others. A couple of
studies have examined the impact of language form in the labor context, such as Bem and
Bem (1973) and Stericker (1981), who showed that women reacted less to job adverts
presented in MG than in alternative language forms. Hamilton, Hunter, and Stuart-
Smith (1992) examined the legal context and found that participants acknowledged less
often that a ctive woman accused of murder could claim self-defense, after they had
read a denition of self-defense in MG language than in alternative language forms. We
are convinced that gender (un-)-aware language has an impact on many more aspects of
everyday life. For example, there is no research to date on how language form may aect
speakers‘ or listeners‘ aect. We think that it would be especially interesting to examine
if MG has an eect on self-related attitudes and feelings like self-esteem or striving for
autonomy. It is possible that eects on this more aective level only appear after a longer
time of confrontation with alternative language forms, which could only be observed by
longitudinal designs.
Obviously, the conclusion from the present study, in the context of previous
research, is that language matters. However, it is also obvious that language forms and
rules alone will not change a system of male dominance that has a history of thousands
of years. If there is no woman in a ministry, a supreme court, or a management board,
speaking of “los/las ministros/as” (the ministers), “los/las jueces” (the judges), or “los/
las gerentes” (the managers) will not miraculously make one appear there. But it will call
attention onto this disparity, it can denounce inequalities and inspire people to dare the
change. And for this purpose it is absolutely justiable and even useful that gender-aware
language may be unfamiliar to our ears and eyes, sometimes complicated and annoying,
or provoking controversies. As long as we face inequalities, discrimination and oppression,
we need to stand up against them, we need to reect our own privileges and practices, we
need controversies. And we need language to talk about it.
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Christiane Kaufmann
Fakultät für Psychologie und Sportwissenschaft
Universität Bielefeld
christiane.kaufmann@uni-bielefeld.de
