Generic forms determine stereotypes in our heads. This is one reason why few girls want to become car mechanics. | Photo: Jan von Holleben

Does the brain think in masculine terms? This is the question posed by Pascal Gygax, a psycholinguist at the University of Fribourg, in the title of a book* recently published with linguist Sandrine Zufferey and social psychologist Ute Gabriel. No need for suspense: the answer is affirmative. The book shows this through a multitude of Swiss and international studies that have analysed the influence of gendered language on sexist representations. “There are 50 years of research and about 200 studies on this subject”, says Gygax, the first author. “It was time to write a book for the general public to reframe the debate, which has become very passionate”.

The reactions to the book attest to this. “In the seventeen years I’ve been working on this subject, I’ve never received so many insults”, he says. “It’s mostly white men in their fifties or sixties in dominant positions who write to explain their point of view, which is often very poorly documented. It’s a pity, because the aim was precisely to gain a scientific perspective”.

In particular, the book looks at the interpretation of the so-called ‘generic’ grammatical form. In French, German, English and other languages, the masculine gender is supposed to be able to act as a ‘neuter’ in the singular or plural (in addition to its ‘specific’ meaning). Here’s an example from the book: “When a kid goes to school, he often feels excited on the first day”. Here, the ‘he’ has a generic function. The problem is that this generic meaning is not understood as such.

The generic is not neutral

In 1984 the US researcher Janet Hyde asked trainees of different ages to write a story beginning with the sentence quoted in the previous paragraph. Among university students, 21 percent of the stories were about a female character, compared to 7 percent among 5-12 year olds. In 2008 a study by Gygax and his colleagues showed that in French and German, it was difficult to grasp sentence sequences presenting women after primers with an occupation or activity in the masculine plural (“les musiciens”, for example), which could therefore act as a generic. To put it plainly: it is naive to think that the generic can be completely detached from the masculine.

The book is also full of examples that show how language has been built around the masculine. It is not innocent that we say ‘Adam and Eve’ and ‘husband and wife’. According to a 2016 meta-analysis by Peter Hegarty and colleagues, the order of mention is often related to the perceived importance of the entities mentioned.

And this masculinisation is at least partly intentional, the book argues. We learn, for example, that in the United States and England, the neuter plural pronoun ‘they’ was used until the 19^th century as a singular pronoun when the gender of a person was not known. But grammarians imposed the pronoun ‘he’ as generic, deeming it more “dignified”. Today, ‘they’ is making a comeback.

This actively androcentric language “forces us to see the world through a male prism”, contributing to gender inequalities, the book claims. This is where inclusive language comes in, as a toolkit for “demasculinising” oral and written expression. In French or German, for example, doublets (“écrivaines et écrivains”) or contracted forms of doublets (“écrivain-es”) can be useful in reducing the stereotypes associated with specific professions. Sabine Sczesny confirms this. As a professor of social psychology at the University of Bern, she has carried out research that shows a link between sexist attitudes and opposition to inclusive language: “Girls are more interested in typically male occupations when they are presented in the conominal form as opposed to the masculine form”.

The neighbour’s cat

Anne Dister, a professor of linguistics at the University of Saint-Louis-Brussels, believes that it is wise to split up certain professions when they are stereotypically male and to mention male and female professions in job advertisements. A supporter of the “economy of language”, she considers it unnecessary to try and feminise everything systematically. “In some contexts, it is not relevant. If I say that my neighbours have adopted a cat, what is the point of specifying their gender?”.

Dister also believes that the generic, in everyday language interactions, is very well understood as such: “Who seriously thinks that women can’t cross on a pedestrian crossing?”. She also disputes claims that language has been entirely masculinised by grammarians: “The lexicon for certain nouns, certainly. But not the grammar. The same examples are always used”. And, she continues: “What makes us invisible is not so much the masculine as our knowledge of the world. Today, the term ‘minister’, which is epicene, does not activate the same representations as it did 50 years ago. The linguist knows what she is talking about. With Marie-Louise Moreau, she has analysed the evolution of the terms used by candidates since 1989 in the European elections in France and Belgium to describe themselves (“senatrice” or “sénateur”, typically). The result: the feminisation is massive.

The personal attacks suffered after the publication of the book do not diminish the commitment of the researcher, who is very present in the media: “I have always wanted to get out of the academic bubble”.