Article written by Charlotte Sherratt
Illustration by Suhani Kapadia
This piece was originally published in ‘Vestige’, Bossy’s 2023 print edition.
Somehow, despite language being awfully precise, putting things into words has failed to capture the essence of any interesting idea I’ve ever wanted to convey. Like trying to paint a rainbow in black and white, something is almost always missing, and good ideas are butchered when put into simple words; the English language is simply not equipped to properly discuss said good ideas. Even as we approach a gender equal world, women are second citizens in the very fabric that makes up the language we speak, and this is not coincidental. The inability to describe all people equally is the biggest failure of language – how can we even advocate for a better future when articulating the problems with the present is cumbersome? I am sick of seeing (and thinking in) language that implicitly or explicitly favours men, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
Growing up speaking two languages, I’ve always found it weird that I think and feel differently in French compared to English. Sure, it’s partially because I’m not entirely fluent in French, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that differentiates how French feels compared to my native English.
This isn’t just personal experience; many multilingual people have similar experiences. Studies show people whose native language has a weaker differentiation between the future and the present (like Mandarin) are significantly more likely to save money, be more physically active, and less likely to smoke cigarettes compared to speakers of a language which strongly differentiates the past, present and future (like English) (Chen, 2013; Thoma & Tytus, 2017). Indeed, one of the main plot points of George Orwell’s 1984 is how language is used to control people’s thoughts, and there is clear evidence that in real life the languages we speak influence how we think and behave, even if we’re not consciously aware of it.
Whether we like it or not, society is very heavily gendered. Its binary categories shape how we interact with and feel around other people. Sure, there are important biological distinctions between the average man and woman, but the very existence of trans, non-binary and intersex people completely undermines the rigidity of the binary society (and by extension language) is built upon. The feminist movement has been ground-breaking in its efforts to equalise all genders both practically and subconsciously, but there is much more work to do. Men still make up the majority in almost all positions of power, make more money, and have more rights. The very words we use to describe the world around us reinforce it; language mirrors the gendered hierarchy of the world we live in. This is backed up by countless evidence. Most notably a study of 4,336 languages (that span 99% of the global population) found that 38% of people natively speak a gendered language. Languages with grammatical gender were associated with a 15% decrease in female labour force participation(relative to men), corresponding to a potential 125 million women not working because of linguistic barriers (Jakiela, 2018). This cannot be a coincidence.
This is perpetuated throughout modern English, French, and frankly almost every language. Despite being a seemingly non-gendered language (i.e., English doesn’t have an explicit grammatical gender, different to languages like Spanish), many English words are implicitly or explicitly gendered. Most obvious is in how ‘man’ refers simultaneously to men and humans. Derivative words like ‘mankind’ or ‘manpower’ have a double meaning, being both masculine and gender neutral, whereas their feminine equivalents ‘womankind’ and ‘womanpower’ are only used in a conscious and deliberate way to exclusively refer to women. In many older texts, ‘he’ is used as a gender-neutral pronoun – or in a deliberate assumption that the reader is a man, a fact I am often made painfully aware of when reading last century’s maths and physics textbooks. Other prejudices are baked deep the framework we use to describe the world around us, with racism, ableism and queerphobia entrenched in common language. Even dictionaries reinforce these, supposedly objective sample sentences perpetuate the biases of the people who write them – men.
Ignoring the complex reasons behind these associations, one has to wonder why they still exist. At face value they are just plainly incorrect. In an effort to include us, once-masculine nouns are often clunkily feminised; phrases like ‘woman scientist’ are a little too common (and condescending). I totally get that ‘female scientist’ isn’t the most inclusive, but surely we can think of a better adjective than the noun ‘woman’. My preferred solution is Merriam-Webster’s recommendation: ‘scientist’. While the US Air Force’s antithetical terminology ‘female airmen’ is almost too funny to be true, in reality it’s just a sad reflection of how language perpetuates gender roles.
There are strong cases for non-gendered language, with arguments ranging from preventing sexism (Martyna, 1980) to simply ironing out inconsistencies and making language more practical. A study on irreversible binomials (pairs like ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘knife and fork’ that sound wrong in the other order) found that there is a gendered bias in the order, with usage preferencing the male/female over female/male (although in family structures the order is sometimes reversed). While one possible explanation was due to word complexity, this only explains the cause and not the effect – irrespective of potentially innocuous origins, the predominant male-biased ordering must influence our perception of the importance of the respective roles. Syntactically referring to women and men in a fair manner is cumbersome – English is just poorly equipped to do so.
French is no different. As a stereotypically gendered language, it isn’t a surprise that it has certain overtly weird gendering (why is a table feminine?). But there is a common trend lying beneath the surface. One thing that’s always seemed weird to me is the meaning of the French words ‘ils’ and ‘elles’ (the two equivalents of plural they, the plurals of the words for he and she respectively). ‘Elles’ is used exclusively for a group of only women, and ‘ils’ is immediately the word whenever there is a single man. It seems bizarre that the presence of one man in a room of thousands of women should, technically, change the word we use to refer to them, but if any number of women walked into a room full of men, they are still referred to as ‘ils’. This is echoed in all across the language. While there are certain words that can be used to refer to all genders, they are almost exclusively masculine words repurposed, to which there also exists a specifically feminine alternative (lui/elle, eux/elles, ce/cette etc.).
Of course, many critics would argue that these grammatical constructions are just that: part of the grammar. They don’t have any intrinsic meaning, and don’t make English, French or any other language a sexist language. Grammatical gender is merely a way of categorising nouns, and isn’t limited to the standard female, male and neutral (the Aboriginal language Dyirbal is an excellent example). In fact, the word ‘gender’ comes from the same root as ‘genre’ (and in French the words are still identical). If you look at the origins of words like ‘male’ and ‘female’, you’ll find they have completely different roots, originating in the Latin words ‘masculus’ and ‘femella’ respectively. When moving from Old French into Old English, the words ‘masle’ and ‘femelle’ were so similar that the spelling and pronunciation were aligned into what we know today (Hoad, 2003). Similarly, the word ‘man’ originally (in Old English) meant human, with the prefixes ‘wer’ and ‘wif’ denoting men and women, but the prefix in ‘werman’ was dropped, while the prefix in ‘wifman’ remained (morphing into ‘woman’) (Hoad, 2003). How the words evolved are simply a coincidence, and a grammatical quirk of modern English. Some would argue the fact that French adjectives are masculine by default, with the feminine form adding a suffix is just how the language works, and is not a reflection of sexism in French society.
I’d argue differently. The evolution of language is a slow, but telling, way of understanding what is and isn’t important to a culture. The continuous hierarchical distinction between women and men throughout history is reflected in the French and English language, with the adoption of a linguistic masculine default reflecting a deeply entrenched gendered preference in our cultures. No, Neil Armstrong was not being sexist when he said the famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, but the very fact that those were the most natural words to use tells us something about American society at the time. The asymmetric treatment of women and men in English is not a linguistic coincidence, but rather a reflection of a biased society.
Fortunately, progressive language change is in progress. The singular ‘they’ is becoming more and more commonplace, both as an alternative to ‘he or she’, as has always been used, but also as a genuine pronoun for non-binary people. The now common honorific ‘Ms’ originated in a pragmatic attempt to resolve the inability to address a woman whose marital status was unknown, but gained traction in women’s desire to be liberated from their relationship to men and rather be seen as their own person outright. Language is continuously evolving, and we see a large amount of intention in young people’s language usage, cutting out historically prejudiced words and deliberately becoming more inclusive (with a healthy dose of cancel culture). The trajectory of modern languages is exciting, with language influencing culture change in all sorts of social issues, such as acceptance of homosexuality (Agovino et al. 2021).
However, we are not nearly there yet. My Larousse Maxipoche 2023, a French dictionary with over 87,000 words, has no mention of the increasingly common gender-neutral pronoun ‘iel’. L’Académie Française, the official authority on the French language, unanimously voted against gender-inclusive language in 2017, calling it an “aberration” and saying the French language found itself faced with “mortal danger”, doubling down on the same stance again in a 2021 press release (Académie Française, 2017 & 2021). The city of Buenos Aires has banned the usage of gender-neutral language in classrooms (Lankes, 2022), and the French government has done the same across the entirety of France (Demarches Administratifs, 2021). This almost primal objection to the de-gendering of language is found all over the world, English being no exception. Instead of embracing language evolution, men decry the corruption of their pure languages, arguing that conforming to tradition is more important that fixing entrenched biases and improving the lives of women and gender diverse people. Doesn’t that argument sound familiar.
But don’t lose hope. We’re well on the way to creating meaningful change in everyday language, continuing a millennia long effort of women before us carving out a place in our world. The trajectory of modern languages is exciting! And honestly, compared to most places in the world Australia is doing pretty well with respect to inclusive language (we conveniently dodge the whole tradesman/person debate with the lovely ‘tradie’). I’m confident that we will get there, despite the countless hurdles that keep cropping up, but there is still more to do. Yes, our current language is inaccurate. But by consciously modifying our language usage, we can effect change and slowly morph English, and other languages, into better systems of describing the world and communicating ideas. Words that were inconceivable 100 years ago are now commonplace, and who knows where we’ll be in a century’s time. I’ll know we’ll finally have made it when it’s called the Men’s World Cup.
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