Gender-free/gender-fair/gender-specific

Gender-free terms do not indicate sex and can be used for either women/girls or men/boys (e.g., teacher, bureaucrat, employee, hiker, operations manager, child, clerk, sales rep, hospital patient, student, grandparent, chief executive officer).

Writing or speech that is gender-fair involves the symmetrical use of gender-specific words (e.g., Ms. Leinwohl/Mr. Kelly, councilwoman/councilman, young man/young woman) and promotes fairness to both sexes in the larger context. To ensure gender-fairness, ask yourself often: Would I write the same thing in the same way about a person of the opposite sex? Would I mind if this were said of me?

If you are describing the behaviour of children on the playground, to be gender-fair you will refer to girls and boys an approximately equal number of times, and you will carefully observe what the children do, and not just assume that only the boys will climb to the top of the jungle gym and that only the girls will play quiet games.

Researchers studying the same baby described its cries as “anger” when they were told it was a boy and as “fear” when they were told it was a girl (cited in Cheris Kramarae, The Voices and Words of Women and Men). We are all victims of our unconscious and most deeply held biases.

Gender-specific words (for example, alderwoman, businessman, altar girl) are neither good nor bad in themselves. However, they need to be used gender-fairly; terms for women and terms for men should be used an approximately equal number of times in contexts that do not discriminate against either of them. One problem with gender-specific words is that they identify and even emphasize a person’s sex when it is not necessary (and is sometimes even objectionable) to do so. Another problem is that they are so seldom used gender-fairly.

Although gender-free terms arc generally preferable, sometimes gender-neutral language obscures the reality of women’s or men’s oppression. Battered spouse implies that men and women are equally battered; this is far from true. Parent is too often taken to mean mother and obscures the fact that more and more fathers are very, much involved in parenting, it is better here to use the gender-specific fathers and mothers or mothers and fathers than the gender-neutral parents.

GENERIC/PSEUDOGENERIC

A generic is an all-purpose word that includes everybody (e.g., workers, people, voters, civilians, elementary school students). Generic pronouns include: we, you, they.

A pseudogeneric is a word that is used as though it includes all people, but that in reality does not. Mankind, forefathers, brotherhood, and alumni are not generic because they leave out women. When used about Americans, immigrants leaves out all those who were here long before the first immigrants. “What a Christian thing to do!” uses Christian as a pseudogeneric for kind or good-Hearted and leaves out all kind, good-hearted people who are not Christians.

Certain generic nouns are often assumed to refer only to men, for example, politicians, physicians, lawyers, voters, legislators, clergy, farmers, colonists, immigrants, slaves, pioneers, settlers, members of the armed forces, judges, taxpayers. References to “settlers, their wives, and children,” or “those clergy permitted to have wives” are pseudogeneric.

In historical context it is particularly damaging for young people to read about settlers and explorers and pioneers as though they were all white men. Our language should describe the accomplishments of the human race in terms of all those who contributed to them.

SEX AND GENDER

An understanding of the difference between sex and gender is critical to the use of bias-free language.

Sex is biological; gender is cultural: our notions of “masculine” tell us how we expect men to behave and our notions of “feminine” tell us how we expect women to behave. Words like womanly/manly, tomboy/sissy, unfeminine/unmasculine have nothing to do with the person’s sex; they are culturally acquired, subjective concepts about character traits and expected behaviors that vary from one place to another, from one individual to another.

Gender describes an individual’s personal, legal, and social status without reference to genetic sex; gender is a subjective cultural attitude. Sex is an objective biological fact. Gender varies according to the culture. Sex is a constant.

The difference between sex and gender is important because much sexist language arises from cultural determinations of what a woman or man “ought” to be. Once a society decides, for example, that to be a man means to hide ones emotions, bring home a paycheck, and be able to discuss football standings while to be a woman means to be soft-spoken, love shopping, babies, and recipes; much of the population becomes a contradiction in terms – unmanly men and unwomanly women. Crying, nagging, gossiping, and shrieking are assumed to be women’s lot; rough-housing, drinking beer, telling dirty jokes, and being unable to find ones socks and keys are laid at men’s collective door. Lists of srereotypes appear silly because very few people fit them. The best way to ensure biased writing and speaking is to describe people as individuals, not as members of a set.

GENDER ROLE WORDS

Certain sex-linked words depend (for their meanings) on cultural stereotypes: feminine/masculine, manly/womanly, boyish/girlish, husbandly/ wifely, fatherly/motherly, unfeminine/unmasculine, unmanly/unwo-manly, etc. What a person understands by these words will vary from culture to culture and even within a culture. Because the words depend (for their meanings) on interpretations of stereotypical behavior or characteristics, they may be grossly inaccurate when applied to individuals. Somewhere, sometime, men and women have said, thought, or done everything the other sex has said, thought, or done except for a very few sex-linked biological activities (e.g., only women can give birth or nurse a baby). To describe a woman as unwomanly is a contradiction in terms; if a woman is doing it, saying it, wearing it, thinking it, it must be – by definition – womanly.

F. Scott Fitzgerald did not use “feminine” to describe the unforgettable Daisy in The Great Gatsby. He wrote instead, “She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.” Daisy’s charm did not belong to Woman; it was uniquely hers. Replacing vague sex-linked descriptors with thoughtful words that describe an individual instead of a member of a set can lead to language that touches people’s minds and hearts.