Can Gender-Fair Language Reduce Gender Stereotyping and Discrimination?
By Sabine Sczesny, Magdalena Formanowicz, F. Moser. 2016
327 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Gender-fair language (GFL) aims at reducing gender stereotyping and discrimination. Two principle strategies have been employed to make languages gender-fair and to treat women and men symmetrically: neutralization and feminization. Neutralization is achieved, for example, by replacing male-masculine forms (policeman) with gender-unmarked forms (police officer), whereas feminization relies on the use of feminine forms to make female referents visible (i.e., the applicant… he or she instead of the applicant… he). By integrating research on (1) language structures, (2) language policies, and (3) individual language behavior, we provide a critical review of how GFL contributes to the reduction of gender stereotyping and discrimination. Our review provides a basis for future research and for scientifically based policy-making.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Natural Language Processing, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Gender Studies
In Natural Language Processing
- Hal Daumé Iii
- Su Lin Blodgett
- Hanna M. Wallach
- Solon Barocas
- David Q. Sun
- Hadas Kotek
- Rikker Dockum
- Yulia Tsvetkov
In Safety, Robustness & Interpretability
- Su Lin Blodgett
- Hal Daumé Iii
- Hanna M. Wallach
- Solon Barocas
- David Q. Sun
- Hadas Kotek
- Rikker Dockum
- Emilio Ferrara
Citations in the corpus
- Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP (2020, background): “As a result, many groups have sought to bring about social changes through changes in language, disrupting patterns of oppression and marginalization via so-called “gender-fair” language (Sczesny et al., 2016; Menegatti and Rubini, 2017),”
- Gender bias and stereotypes in Large Language Models (2023, background): “The effects of stereotyping have been shown to affect children at very young ages, influencing how they perceive their own abilities, and leading to differences in chosen hobbies, interests, and eventually also academic paths and occupations [11, 55, 63, 67, 82].”
- Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. (2022, unknown): “In many other languages, however, all nouns (including inanimate ones) are categorized by grammatical gender [58], whereas languages like Turkish, Finnish, and Indonesian are categorized as ‘genderless’; even their pronouns are gender neutral [59].”