The Gendering of Language: A Comparison of Gender Equality in Countries with Gendered, Natural Gender, and Genderless Languages Jennifer Prewitt-Freilino Rhode Island School of Design Introduction Feminists have long argued that sexist language can have real world consequences for gender relations and the relative status of men and women (see Martyna, 1980), and recent research suggests that grammatical gender can shape how people interpret the world around them along gendered lines (Boroditsky, 2009). For example, the gendering of language (even that which appears mundane and purely grammatical, such as the use of la versus le in French) can actually influence people’s perceptions of the masculine or feminine characteristics of objects (Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillip, 2003; Konishi, 1993). If conventions of grammatical gender affect people’s perceptions of gender in non-human objects, could it similarly affect the real world social relations of men and women? Beyond the perception of objects, Stahlberg and colleagues have proposed a link between grammatical gender in language and the relative social standing of men and women in society (Stahlberg, Braun, Irmen, & Sczesny, 2007), and in line with this prediction, preliminary research confirms a link between the grammatical gender of language and sexist attitudes (Wasserman & Welesley, 2009). In the current work, we explore whether the grammatical gender of a language system predicts cross-cultural variations in gender equality over and above the predictive power of other cross-cultural factors by comparing countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless language systems on archival indices of gender equality. Grammatically, almost all languages can be divided into three gender-related groups: grammatical gender languages, natural gender languages, and genderless languages (see Stahlberg et al., 2007). Although gender neutral conventions can be developed for languages within all grammatical groups, it is not equally easy to address gendered grammar conventions across these groups. In fact, Stahlberg and colleagues (2007) note that grammatical gender languages involve much more effort to create a gender neutral configuration because such reconfigurations require changing a large number of personal nouns in addition to pronouns. Furthermore, although it might appear that genderless languages already exhibit a gender fair grammatical style, there is evidence that gender neutral nouns and pronouns can be interpreted with an implicit male bias (Stahlberg et al., 2007). Take, for example, research showing that replacing masculine generics (he) with gender- symmetrical terms (he/she) led to greater visualization of female actors compared to gender neutral terms (they; Hyde, 1984; Switzer, 1990), suggesting it might be more difficult to convey a gender neutral interpretation in genderless languages that lack gendered pronouns. Hypotheses Given the previous research outline above demonstrating the difficulty involved in crafting gender fair communications in gendered languages, we anticipated the following: Hypothesis 1. Countries predominated by a gendered language system should evidence less gender equality than countries where natural gender or genderless languages are spoken, even when controlling for geographic, religious, political, and developmental variations that could also explain differences in gender equality among countries. Hypothesis 2. Countries predominated by a natural gender language system should evidence greater gender equality than countries with other grammatical gender systems Method Sample. We categorized 134 countries (those represented in the 2009 Global Gender Gap Report; Hausmann, Tyson, & Zahidi, 2009) based on the predominant language(s) spoken as either gendered (54.5%), natural gender (9%), genderless (19.4%), or some combination (17.1%). The languages spoken in each country were found through the Central Intelligence Agency’s Factbook (2010). We only analyzed the differences between countries that fell neatly into one gender language category (i.e., gendered, natural gender, or genderless), which left 111 countries in our sample (73 gendered, 12 natural gender, and 26 genderless). Gender Equality. In order to compare countries’ level of gender equality, we utilized data from the 2009 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (Hausmann et al., 2009). According to its authors, the Global Gender Gap (GGG) Index “benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education- and health-based criteria, and provides country rankings that allow for effective comparisons across regions and income groups” (p. 3). The GGG Index represents an un-weighted average composite of four sub- indices (Economic participation and opportunity, Educational attainment, Political empowerment, and Health and survival). Covariates. In order to determine if any existing differences in gender equality between countries with different grammatical gender language systems persisted even when other factors that could impact gender equality were accounted for, we entered several other factors into our final model as potential covariates: 1) a measure of geographic region that contrasted countries from Eastern versus Western cultures, 2) a measure of religious tradition that contrasted countries in which Islam and Hinduism were the primary religious traditions versus countries where Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, irreligion, or other religions predominate, 3) a measure of political system that contrasted countries with democratic republics and constitutional monarchies versus other forms of government, and 4) the 2010 Human Development Index (HDI) published by the United Nations, which “combines information on life expectancy, schooling and income in a simple composite measure” (Klugman et al, 2010; p. 2-3). Results To test the effects of language classification on gender equality, we submitted the Global Gender Gap (GGG) rating to an ANCOVA with the government, religion, and geography contrasts, along with HDI scores as covariates. All the covariates were significant except the geographic location contrast (ps ≤ .02), and even when controlling for these factors, differences in gender equality between countries with different grammatical language systems emerged, F (2, 103) = 12.68, p < .001. The pattern (shown in Figure 1) indicates that countries that speak gendered languages evidence less gender equality than countries that speak natural gender and genderless languages, even when taking factors like religious traditions, systems of government, and level of development into account. To ensure that the covariates were not masking any significant effects, we ran the analyses with the covariates removed. This yielded a significant effect of language system, F (2, 108) = 8.58, p < .001, and follow-up Tukey tests revealed that countries that speak natural gender languages demonstrated greater overall gender equality than countries that speak genderless or gendered languages (see Figure 2). Discussion In the current work, we anticipated that the grammatical gender classification of the primary language spoken within a given country had the potential to predict gender equality in that country. As predicted, countries that speak gendered languages evidence less gender equality than countries that speak natural gender or genderless languages even when other factors that could influence variations in gender equality (e.g., religious tradition, system of government) are taken into account (Hypothesis 1). Moreover, the current findings suggest that countries that speak natural gender languages may be even more apt to exhibit gender equality than in countries where gendered or genderless languages are spoken (Hypothesis 2). As Stahlberg and colleagues (2007) have noted, despite the assumption that genderless languages are gender fair or neutral, research demonstrates that a seemingly gender neutral term (e.g., “they”) can be interpreted in a gender biased way. Therefore, genderless languages can include seemingly gender neutral terms that in fact connote a male bias. However, because they do not possess grammatical gender, it is not possible to use female pronouns or nouns to “emphasize women’s presence in the world,” which could mean “androcentricity in a genderless language may even increase the lexical, semantic and conceptual invisibility of women” (Engelberg, 2002, p.128). In contrast, gendered languages are so fundamentally based in gender that it is complicated to attempt to reform the gender asymmetry (Stahlberg et. al, 2007). In sum, natural gender languages may be the most successful at promoting gender-inclusive language, because unlike genderless languages they are able to include gender-symmetrical forms in pronouns and nouns (thus increasing the visibility of women), but compared to gendered languages they do not depend upon gendered structures that would limit the legibility or intelligibility of symmetrical revisions. For many years, feminist critics have been calling for language reform to reduce or eliminate the use of gender asymmetries, masculine generics, and other biases in language and make language more gender fair (Martyna, 1980). Despite the notion that grammatical gender is harmless (or even poetic; see Deutscher, 2010), given the differences in gender equality that emerged in the current work, it might be worth considering how grammatical gender impacts attempts at language reform, and whether the limitations of gendered and genderless languages to adequately reform sexist language could impact real world perceptions of gender, and ultimately the everyday lives of women and men. References Boroditsky, L. (2009). How does our language shape the way we think? In M. Brockman (ed.) What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science (pp. 116–129), New York: Vintage Press. Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L. A., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax, and semantics. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (pp. 61–79), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Central Intelligence Agency (2010). The world factbook: Languages. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/fields/2098.html. Deutscher, G. (2010). Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other languages. New York: Metropolitan Books. Engelberg, M. (2002). The communication of gender in Finnish. In M. Hellinger & H. Bußmann (eds.), Gender across languages (Vol. 2, pp. 109-132). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Company. Hausmann, R., Tyson, L.D., & Zahidi, S. (2009). The Global Gender Gap 2009. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum. Retrieved from http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gendergap/report2009.pdf Hyde, J. S. (1984). Children's understanding of sexist language. Developmental Psychology, 20, 697-706. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.20.4.697 Klugman, J. & [et al.] (2010). Human development report 2010 (20th anniversary edition): The real wealth of nations: Pathways to human development. New York: United Nations Development Programme. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2010_EN_Complete_reprint.pdf Konishi, T. (1993). The semantics of grammatical gender: A cross-cultural study. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 519–534. doi: 10.1007/BF01068252 Martyna, W. (1980). Beyond the “he/man” approach: The case for nonsexist language. Signs, 5, 482-493. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173588. Stahlberg, D., Braun, F., Irmen, L., & Sczesny, S. (2007). Representation of the sexes in language. In K. Fiedler (Ed.), Social communication (pp. 163- 187). New York: Psychology Press. Switzer, J.Y. (1990). The impact of generic word choices: An empirical investigation of age and sex-related differences. Sex Roles, 22, 69-82. doi:10.1007/BF00288155 Wasserman, B. D., & Weseley, A. J., (2009) ¿Qué? Quoi? Do Languages with Grammatical Gender Promote Sexist Attitudes? Sex Roles, 61, 634-643. doi: 10.1007/s11199-009-9696-3 Gendered Most nouns gendered (masculine, feminine) e.g., German, Spanish, Hindi Natural Gender Most nouns not gendered, but pronouns gendered e.g., English, Swedish Genderless Nouns and pronouns are not gendered e.g., Turkish, Finnish, Chinese Gendered Natural Genderless Figure 2. GGG Index by Language Group without Covariates 0.6 0.65 0.7 0.75 0.8 Gendered Natural Genderless Figure 1. GGG Index by Language Group with Covariates