Gender marking in job titles

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A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job titles stewardess and seamstress imply that the person is female, whilst the corresponding job titles steward and seamster imply that the person is male. A gender-neutral job title, on the other hand, is one that does not specify or imply gender, such as firefighter or lawyer. In some cases, it may be debatable whether a title is gender-specific; for example, chairman appears to denote a male (because of the ending -man), but the title is also applied sometimes to women.

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Proponents of gender-neutral language generally advocate the use of gender-neutral job titles, particularly in contexts where the gender of the person in question is not known or not specified. For example, they prefer flight attendant to stewardess or steward, and police officer to policeman or policewoman. In some cases this may involve deprecating the use of certain specifically female titles (such as authoress), thus encouraging the use of the corresponding unmarked form (such as author) as a fully gender-neutral title.

The above applies to gender neutrality in English and in some other languages without grammatical gender (where grammatical gender is a feature of a language's grammar that requires every noun to be placed in one of several classes, often including feminine and masculine). In languages with grammatical gender, the situation is altered by the fact that nouns for people are often constrained to be inherently masculine or feminine, and the production of truly gender-neutral titles may not be possible. In such cases, proponents of gender-neutral language may instead focus on ensuring that feminine and masculine words exist for every job, and that they are treated with equal status.

Examples

The suffix -man had the meanings "person" and "adult male" in Old English (see man), but, even when used as a gender-neutral term to include women, it was understood to still mainly refer to males. [1] Around the 20th century, the gender-neutral use of man and -man declined. [1] Thus job titles that include this suffix, such as fireman, salesman and alderman, generally imply that the holder is male. [1] While some of these job titles have feminine variants (e.g. alderwoman), others do not, because traditionally the positions in question were not occupied by women. [2] For most such titles, gender-neutral equivalents now also exist, such as police officer, salesperson or sales representative (for salesman or saleswoman), etc. However, some proposed gender-neutral terms have not attained such common usage (as with fisher as an alternative to fisherman). Military ranks with the suffix -man normally remain unchanged when applied to women: for example, a woman serving in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers might be known as Craftsman Atkins.

Examining the Time magazine corpus (texts from the 1920s to the 2000s), researcher Maria Bovin found: [3]

The usage of the neutral term fire fighter has increased, starting in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the frequency of usage is lower, but it is also evident from the rows showing the total instances of all of the terms that the overall mentioning of the professionals in this line of work was less frequent in this decade. In addition, it is notable that the usage of firewoman is non-existent. In the case of policewoman, the frequency of usage is very low in all of the decades examined, but there are at least some instances of the term being used. The term firewoman, on the other hand, appears to never have been used in the magazine.

In the case of chairman, gender-neutral alternatives (such as chair and chairperson) exist, although in some contexts the word chairman is used even where it denotes (or could denote) a woman. For details, see Chairman .

Feminine terms such as actress, usherette and comedienne are marked with respect to the masculine (actor, usher, comedian) both formally (i.e. something is added to the masculine form) and in the sense that only the masculine form can be used generically to describe a mixed-gender group of people. [2] This means that the "masculine" form can in fact serve as a gender-neutral term (a solution often favored by proponents of gender-neutral language, who thus tend to deprecate or restrict usage of the specifically feminine forms). Some such feminine forms, such as poetess and authoress, are now rarely used. Others, such as actress, remain common, although increasing numbers of women are calling themselves actors rather than actresses. [4] The Screen Actors Guild annually gives out awards for "Best Male Actor" and "Best Female Actor".

The term waiter appears to retain masculine specificity (with waitress as the corresponding feminine term). Other gender-neutral terms have therefore been proposed, such as server (alternatives include waitron, waitstaff or waitperson), though these are rarely used outside North America.

The term midwife looks superficially to be feminine (since it ends with -wife), but it is used for either gender. The term comes from an Old English term meaning "with the woman". [5]

In an examination of "business-related titles" such as businessman and business people, "overall usage of these terms seems to have decreased since the 1960s" when examining Time magazine: When "looking specifically at the difference between the gender-marked titles and the gender-neutral ones, businessperson(s) and businesspeople, there has been an increase usage of the neutral businesspeople (if all spelling variations are included). Yet, this is not a large increase, and as it is used to refer to a group of people rather than an individual, its relevance may be questionable. Noticeable is the fact that businessperson is remarkably infrequent, and only appears in three decades. The term businesswoman may be increasing again between the 1980s and the 2000s, after a lower usage in the preceding fifty years. It has its highest frequency of usage in the 1920s." [6]

Origin of the word "master" are late Old English: "a man having control or authority; a teacher or tutor", from Latin magister (n.), a contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") meaning "chief, head, director, teacher", and the source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister. [7]

"Garner's Usage Tip of the Day" states, in regards to "layman; layperson; lay person", that "'Layman' is the most common among these terms and is commonly regarded as unexceptionable — in reference to members of both sexes, of course." [8]

Evolution over time

The case for switching to gender-neutral job titles usually makes an ideological argument, that gender-specific job titles at some level promote sexism in the workplace. [9] For example, fire chiefs have argued that when the public uses the term "fireman" instead of "firefighter", it reinforces the popular image that firefighting is only a job for men, and thus makes it difficult for them to recruit women. [10] Studies found that people assume maleness when they read job titles with -man, [9] [11] and they found that women were less likely to apply to jobs that used -man in their application. [11]

During the 19th century, attempts to overlay Latin grammar rules onto English required the use of feminine endings in nouns ending with -ess. [12] This produced words like doctress and professoress and even lawyeress, [12] all of which have fallen out of use; though waitress, stewardess, and actress are in modern use.

Use of the term chairman remains widespread in predominantly male sectors of society, but chairperson or chair is now widespread in society in general, at least in the US, [13] Canada and increasingly in the UK. For example, the boards of most Fortune 500 companies in the United States are presided over by a "chairman" and also the overwhelming majority of the (FTSE 100) companies in the United Kingdom have a "chairman", while committees in the United States House of Representatives are presided over by a "chair", as of 2009. [14] Since most of these are, however, men, a more correct description of the current language situation needs to consider use in organisations whose chairperson is a woman. Less than half of the members of the American Heritage Dictionary 's usage panel accept the use of the word chairman in describing a woman. [15]

Some usage guides, such as The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, advocate gender-neutral language in circumstances where all sexes are meant to be included. For instance, a business might advertise that it is looking for a new chair or chairperson rather than chairman. Gender-neutral language discourages chairman, on the grounds that some readers would assume women and those of other genders are implicitly excluded from responding to an advertisement using this word. [16]

Feminist Philosophy of Language, a guide on sexism in language and feminist language reform, also discourages the usage of man and -man as gender-neutral because it has male bias and erases women under a masculine word. [17] They also discourage titles like "lady doctor" because it makes men the default and implies that the ability and competence of workers, in this case a doctor, are dependent on their sex. [17]

The United States military has also examined traditional job titles, in line with the 2016 decision to allow women to serve in all combat jobs. [18]

Generally accepted writing conventions

Proponents of gender-neutral job titles believe that such titles should be used, especially when referring to hypothetical persons. For example, firefighter instead of fireman; mail carrier, letter carrier, or post worker rather than mailman; flight attendant instead of steward or stewardess; bartender instead of barman or barmaid. In the rare case where no useful gender-neutral alternative is available, they believe both male and female terms should be used.

Proponents of gender-neutral language advocate the use of a neuter form when/where appropriate. For example, a company may seek to fill a vacancy and hire a new chairperson. Since a gendered individual doesn't currently hold the position, its title reverts to a neuter form. Once that position is filled, many advocates believe gender can be attached to the title as appropriate (chairman or chairwoman).

Sometimes this formulation can lead to inconsistent gender-specific usage, in which women become chairpersons but men remain chairmen. Some women opt to use the word chairman in preference to chairwoman, subject to the style Madam or Mister prefixing the title, which they perceive to be gender-neutral by itself. Particularly in academia, the word Chair is often used to designate the person chosen to oversee the agenda at meetings of an organized group.

The principle of gender-neutral language dictates that job titles that add suffixes to make them feminine should be avoided. For example, "usher", not "usherette"; "comedian", not "comedienne". Some of these are almost entirely obsolete now, such as sculptress, authoress, poetess, and aviatrix. If gender is relevant, the words woman or female should be used instead of "lady" ("my grandmother was the first female doctor in the province"), except if the masculine is "lord" (as in "landlady"). In the case of landlord or landlady, it may be preferable to find an equivalent title with the same meaning, such as proprietor or lessor. However, when a woman is in the office of "the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod", it is changed to "the Lady Usher of the Black Rod" or simply "Usher of the Black Rod", as in Canada.

Advisors on non-sexist usage deprecate terms such as "male nurse", "female doctor", "male model", or "female judge" because such terms are often used when the gender and sex is irrelevant. [17] These advisors say that the statement of exception reinforces harmful assumptions about the gender of people in those professions. [19]

Languages other than English

When words have a grammatical gender associated with them, in many languages, they may impose morphological requirements to maintain sentence agreement. That is, there is a non-political content to the word changes, or inflection. Nevertheless, gender-identification word endings are sometimes dropped, something that happened often in the former East Germany, for example. [20] Sometimes an entirely new or etymologically unrelated word is coined. For example, when men in France wanted to become midwives, which up until then was an exclusively female occupation, they chose not to adapt the existing term sage-femme ('wise woman'), and instead coined maïeuticien.

See also

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender. The values present in a given language, of which there are usually two or three, are called the genders of that language.

Womyn is one of several alternative political spellings of the English word women, used by some feminists. There are other spellings, including womban or womon (singular), and wombyn or wimmin (plural). Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix "-man" or "-men", see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm. Recently, the term womxn has been used by intersectional feminists to indicate the same ideas while foregrounding or more explicitly including transgender women, non-binary women, intersex women, queer women, and women of color.

Gender-neutral language is language that avoids assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific. In most other Indo-European languages, nouns are grammatically masculine or grammatically feminine, or sometimes grammatically neuter, regardless of the actual gender of the referent.

A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages, such as Slavic, with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.

Androcentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing a masculine point of view at the center of one's world view, culture, and history, thereby culturally marginalizing femininity. The related adjective is androcentric, while the practice of placing the feminine point of view at the center is gynocentric.

Gender asymmetry is an aspect of the constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto which has been challenged by numerous proposals seeking to regularize both grammatical and lexical gender.

Epicenity is the lack of gender distinction, often reducing the emphasis on the masculine to allow the feminine. It includes androgyny – having both masculine and feminine characteristics. The adjective gender-neutral may describe epicenity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chair (officer)</span> Leading or presiding officer of an organized group

The chair, also chairman, chairwoman, or chairperson, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the group or organisation, presides over meetings of the group, and is required to conduct the group's business in an orderly fashion.

Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the collective use of male or female terms. For example, the words policeman and stewardess are gender-specific job titles; the corresponding gender-neutral terms are police officer and flight attendant. Other gender-specific terms, such as actor and actress, may be replaced by the originally male term; for example, actor used regardless of gender. Some terms, such as chairman, that contain the component -man but have traditionally been used to refer to persons regardless of sex are now seen by some as gender-specific. An example of forming phrases in a coequal manner would be using husband and wife instead of man and wife. Examples of discontinuing the collective use of terms in English when referring to those with unknown or indeterminate gender as singular they, and using humans, people, or humankind, instead of man or mankind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender</span> Usage of wording balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense

Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is the usage of wording that is balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns when referring to two or more genders or to a person of an unknown gender in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. This stance is often inspired by feminist ideas about gender equality. Gender neutrality is also used colloquially when one wishes to be inclusive of people who identify as non-binary genders or as genderless.

A genderless language is a natural or constructed language that has no distinctions of grammatical gender—that is, no categories requiring morphological agreement between nouns and associated pronouns, adjectives, articles, or verbs.

Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word, in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. These mostly arise in generalizations and are particularly common in abstract, theoretical or strategic discourse. Examples include "readers of Wikipedia appreciate their encyclopedia", "the customerwho spends in this market".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender in English</span>

A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period; therefore, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender. Modern English lacks grammatical gender in the sense of all noun classes requiring masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement; however, it does retain features relating to natural gender with particular nouns and pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other sexes and neuter pronouns for sexless objects. Also, in some cases, feminine pronouns are used by some speakers when referring to ships, to churches, and to nation states and islands.

A girlfriend is a woman who is a friend, acquaintance or partner to the speaker, usually a female companion with whom one is platonically, romantically, or sexually involved. In a romantic context, this normally signifies a committed relationship where the individuals are not married. Other titles, for example "wife" or "partner", usually signify that the individuals are legally married.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender neutrality in Spanish</span> Gender neutral language in Spanish

Feminist language reform has proposed gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender, such as Spanish. Grammatical gender in Spanish refers to how Spanish nouns are categorized as either masculine or feminine. As in other Romance languages—such as Portuguese, to which Spanish is very similar—a group of both men and women, or someone of unknown gender, is usually referred to by the masculine form of a noun and/or pronoun. Advocates of gender-neutral language modification consider this to be sexist, and exclusive of gender non-conforming people. They also stress the underlying sexism of words whose feminine form has a different, often less prestigious meaning. Some argue that a gender neutral Spanish can reduce gender stereotyping, deconstructing sexist gender roles and discrimination in the workplace.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grammatical gender in Spanish</span> Feature of Spanish

In Spanish, grammatical gender is a linguistic feature that affects different types of words and how they agree with each other. It applies to nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns. Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence. Generally, nouns referring to males or male animals are masculine, while those referring to females are feminine. In terms of importance, the masculine gender is the default or unmarked, while the feminine gender is marked or distinct.

A gender neutral title is a title that does not indicate the gender identity, whatever it may be, of the person being formally addressed. Honorifics are used in situations when it is inappropriate to refer to someone only by their first or last name, such as when addressing a letter, or when introducing the person to others.

Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminization of language</span> Reclassification of gendered nouns and adjectives

In linguistics, feminization refers to the process of re-classifying nouns and adjectives which as such refer to male beings, including occupational terms, as feminine. This is done most of the time by adding inflectional suffixes denoting a female.

<i>Binnen-I</i> Style for gender-neutral written German

In German, a medial capital I is a non-standard, mixed case typographic convention used to indicate gender inclusivity for nouns having to do with people, by using a capital letter 'I' inside the word surrounded by lower-case letters. An example is the word LehrerInnen. With a lower case I in that position, Lehrerinnen is just the standard word for "female teachers".

References

  1. 1 2 3 "man, n.1 (and int.)", OED Online, Oxford University Press, retrieved 9 December 2021
  2. 1 2 Aarts, Bas and April M. S. McMahon. The Handbook of English Linguistics. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2006, ISBN   978-1-4051-1382-3, p. 737.
  3. ↑ Bovin, Maria (2016). Christopher, Stroud (ed.). Occupational titles and supposed gender-neutrality: A corpus-based diachronic study on gender-neutral occupational titles in American English (PDF) (BA). Department of English, Stockholm University . Retrieved 24 March 2021.
  4. ↑ Linden, Sheri (18 January 2009). "From actor to actress and back again". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 29 August 2023.
  5. ↑ "Midwife" . Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press.(Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  6. ↑ "Occupational titles and supposed genderneutrality A corpus-based diachronic study on genderneutral occupational titles in American English" (PDF). DiVA portal. 2016. S2CID   148355388. Archived (PDF) from the original on 1 February 2019. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  7. ↑ "master – Origin and meaning". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
  8. ↑ Garner, Bryan A. (18 December 2014). "Garner's Usage Tip of the Day: layman; layperson; lay person". LawProse.org. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
  9. 1 2 "Sexist Job Titles and the Influence of Language on Gender Stereotypes". | College of Humanities. 28 January 2015. Retrieved 9 December 2021.
  10. ↑ Cotton, Dany (17 October 2017). "Why We Are Campaigning to Shake Off the Outdated Term 'Firemen'". HuffPost (UK ed.).
  11. 1 2 Deshmukh, Ameya (12 November 2019). "Bias In Job Descriptions: Your First Step to Creating a More Diverse Workforce". Mya. Retrieved 9 December 2021.
  12. 1 2 "-ess - definition of -ess". The Free Dictionary. Retrieved 26 November 2022.
  13. ↑ "person". American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.). Usage Note. Archived from the original on 21 April 2008. Retrieved 24 March 2021– via Bartleby.com. Only 48 percent (43 percent of the women and 50 percent of the men) accept the use of the word in 'Emily Owen, chairman of the Mayor's Task Force, issued a statement assuring residents that their views would be solicited.'
  14. ↑ House language becomes gender neutral
  15. ↑ "man". American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.). Usage Note. Archived from the original on 22 February 2008. Retrieved 24 March 2021– via Bartleby.com. Only 48 percent (43 percent of the women and 50 percent of the men) accept the use of the word in 'Emily Owen, chairman of the Mayor's Task Force, issued a statement assuring residents that their views would be solicited.'
  16. ↑ The Cambridge Guide to English Usage pp 243,4
  17. 1 2 3 Saul, Jennifer; Diaz-Leon, Esa (2018), "Feminist Philosophy of Language", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 10 December 2021
  18. ↑ "U.S. military tackling gender-neutral job titles". CBS News. 9 June 2016. Retrieved 2 September 2023.
  19. ↑ "Gender-Inclusive Language", The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  20. ↑ "Review of: Mary Fulbrook, The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker". H-Net, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Archived 11 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine ISBN   978-0-300-10884-2.
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