In recent years, more and more feminist movements focus on the relationship between language and gender. In 1884, a French politician named Yvette Roudy initiated the study of the feminine expressions in the French context. Similarly, “Me Too” movement in 2018 demonstrated the German language as sexist. The idea of implicit sexism against women in the language structure around the world has been raised throughout these movements. This sparked my reflection on the relationship between language and gender equality. Obviously, language is slowly formed in the process of using, but to some extent, there are inevitably different ideological tendencies and value judgments in the process of language transmission and use, which reinforces gender differences and existing stereotypes. Language and gender equality are not confined to books and everyday conversations, but ingrained in our social patterns. In other words, the language we learn since we are born reflects the real-world situations, where the unequal treatments of women in politics, education, economy, and culture prevail. I argue that our use of language reflects and influences people’s perceptions of gender roles. To try to combat gender inequality, I believe it is of crucial importance to first change the patriarchal nature implicitly embedded in our language.

The motivation behind this essay stems from the strong power and influence in words and sentences. The goal of this essay, which is perhaps different from what traditional feminist movements focused on (e.g. changing women’s status by directly aiming at improving their current situations), is to raise awareness about the language that perpetuates sexism every time we speak. Although many people may think my argument and protest are meaningless because the languages we use have been around for a long time, I strongly believe that changing the way we speak and write would help change how people perceive gender roles fundamentally.

Moreover, writing itself is a kind of resistance to patriarchal language, and what I think the power of language itself is a very important part for being a feminist. In order to provoke change, writing is an act of self-discovery, resistance and faith. It is a fact that words evoke pity, understanding, outrage and provide wisdom. (Norment 2021) The power of writing is evident in Virginia Woolf and her famous novel, A Room of One’s Own. In the book, she deployed a lot of metaphors to explore social injustices against women, especially women’s lack of free expression. With her vivid and empathetic language, Woolf suggested that the absence of female fiction was because women had little opportunities for education, rather than a distinct absence of talent. (Woolf 2019) Today, although more opportunities are present for women, there is still a paramount of inequalities against women. Writing still plays a crucial role in self-expression and serve as a powerful tool to refute the discriminated views on women. Thus, the act of composing this essay itself is also a step towards making concrete changes.

In this article, I will firstly demonstrate the universality of sexism existing in our languages. I will then explain how such gendered languages affect our mindsets, leading to the importance of changing the current language structures. Finally, I will discuss the attempts made to subvert this sexist practice.

Gender inequality reflected in words and characters is very common around the world. The French language, for instance, divides words into “feminine” and “masculine” forms. Many of the words in French are explicitly sexist, including many job titles that are not feminine because they were originally thought to be for men only. For instance, un pompier (firefighter), chauffeur (driver), and ingenieur (engineer), only exist in masculine forms. The part femme will be added when indicating women doing these professions. 

In addition, the meanings of some occupations are different in feminine and masculine forms. Feminine forms have a derogatory connotation compared to masculine counterparts, such as cuisiner and cuisiniere which indicates that men have the ability to be a cook while women can only prepare food at home.

In English, lower-status occupations tend to have both male and female nouns, such as actor/actress, host/hostess and waiter/waitress. Further, some occupations are always considered as if they were for male only, such as professor and doctor. Toindicate that these words are female, gender words such as "women" and "lady" are usually added. In contrast, teacher and nurse are generally regarded as women. The contrast between doctor (men) /nurse (women), and professor (men) / teacher (women) suggest that occupations associated with a higher status in society are often dominated by men.

This is also particularly common in the Chinese language system. When people refer to certain female occupations, such terms are sexist because they are often used in a biased or negative context. For example, the term nvsiji (女司机), often used to describe female drivers, which is actually a stereotype suggesting that women are unskilled at driving. If the term nvsiji appears in a news article, it is highly likelythat the article would describe an accident caused by women's "bad driving skills."

Also, in Chinese, some characters are divided into left and right parts. The most common Chinese demonstrative pronouns ta (他)and ta (她), which refer to “he” and “she” respectively in English, are divided into two parts. While the right-side parts are the same, the left-side part of the characters are different--for the pronoun he, the left part means "human", whereas for "she", the left side part means "women." 

Although often unnoticed, such design of characters puts the status of women into question: men are human, but women are considered to be different from and other than human? Further, why should the pronoun for women and men be different? Now that I have established the universality of sexism in our language structures, I will now discuss how languages affect us. Using language is the most important way of communicating in human society. In George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, the “New Speak” reform is an important plot. One of the goals of the “New Speak” is to eliminate certain vocabularies. For instance, words like perfect, brilliant, and fantastic are replaced by words like good, plus good, and double good. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” (Orwell 276) the narrator Wilson says in the novel. Language itself is the carrier of thought. The changes in language will inevitably bring about change in the way we think. Since language sets a frame for how people think, the gendered markings in each language we speak significantly affect the general public's attitudes regarding how we should perceive men and women.

In our daily lives, we are not very conscious of the languages we are using. Large amounts of research have demonstrated that the ways people use gendered language, regardless of contexts and orders, would shape their view regarding gender.

According to a study at London Business School, they tested whether people’s way of placing gendered words would reflect the social norms on gender. In an office setting, 92.4 percent of conjoined phrases in participants’ responses positioned man before women. There is a strong tendency for people who place men before women to consider that men were more central and received more attention in the businessworld. (Seline 2017) In short, our social norms structure the way we use words, and in turn, the words we use shape our social norms regarding gender.

Besides, gender-marked languages require people to differentiate between men and women, reinforcing the gender differences prescribed by social norms. A study conducted by UCLA showed that the speakers of genderless languages, such as Estonian which do not require speakers to designate the gender of objects, expressed more liberalized attitudes towards gender equality. For instance, in one of their study,asking whether the Estonian and Russian people support changes in paternity leave policy, which was deemed as a positive step towards alleviating women from unequally long hours of childcare, researchers found that the probability of supporting the policy change is 35% for Russian, while it is 43% for Estonian. Hence, a genderless tongue leads its speakers to perceive less asymmetry between men and women. (Efrén O. Pérez 2019)

The UCLA experiment points to the possibility that if we can make changes on the fundamental level--to use a genderless language, we might be able to raise people's awareness of the existing gender inequalities. However, it is perhaps impossible to ask people to adopt a new language all of a sudden. What could be done is to make interventions in the languages people are using today. Some efforts havealready been made towards this direction. For instance, some countries have mandated the use of specific words like “police officer” instead of using words like “police-man.” That is, replacing gendered words with gender-neutral terms. Another example is made by French feminist Helene Cixous. In her well-known essay, "The laugh of Medusa," Cixous reclaims Medusa (a female figure previously rendered as amonstrous man-killer) and encourages women to take control of their narratives and write. She also creates a word illes, which is a fusion of the masculine pronoun ils with the feminine pronoun elles in French. It might see like a small intervention, the impacts of such intervention are nevertheless immense. Cixous' proposal calls for a “feminine mode” of writing--the necessity to create a new set of words, phrases and writing in order to disrupt the sexist speaking and writing tradition. (Cixous 1976) Firmly believing that creating a world that is non-discriminatory, I have also acted on this idea. In Cantonese, swearings are mostly related to women. Thus, my classmates and I organized a group to study the impact of female-degrading terms in Cantonese, and Canton people's perceptions of gender equality. We did informal interviews, asking Canton speakers on their reactions when they hear Canton swearings. A large number of people found it insulting to hear such swear words, and also think they implied an unfair attitude towards women. In order to improve this situation, our group mates decided to create a word to replace the object of women by a word which synthesize both men and women.

Admittedly, our effort is limited to some degree. The use of this new word can only be spread within our family, school, and their surroundings. I nevertheless see this as a good starting point towards raising awareness of existing gender inequality and changing people's perception of gender. Imagine if swear words toward women are replaced with genderless alternatives, and people actually start to use the newwords, gradually, gendered bias in words would be eliminated, and then in people's minds. Gender equality would not be achieved by simply addressing the end result of sexism. Patriarchy would only be eliminated if we also tackle it by touching one of the most fundamental level of things--the language we speak, which has the power to affect how we think and act.

Works Cited

Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa - WWW2 Web Server. http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576F10/cixous.pdf.

Kesebir, Selin, et al. “The Role of Language in the Gender Gap.” INSEAD Knowledge,9 Nov. 2017, https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/the-role-oflanguage-in-the-gender-gap-7661#:~:text=Our%20use%20of%20language%20reflects%20and%20influences%20perceptions%20of%20gender%20roles.&text=But%20a%20body%20of%20evidence,a%20woman%20or%20a%20man.

Norment, Nathaniel. “Writing(s) as Resistance: All Forms of Writing Are Resistance!” Blog Posts : Writing(s) as Resistance : Morehouse College, https://facultyblog.morehouse.edu/blog-posts/link-to-article-23893-en.html.

Orwell, George, and Audiberti Amélie. 1984. Gallimard, 2017.

Tavits, Efrén O. Pérez and Margit, et al. “Language Influences Public Attitudes toward Gender Equality: The Journal of Politics: Vol 81, No 1.” The Journal of Politics, 1 Jan. 2019, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/700004.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Alma Classics, 2019.