Generically intended, but specifically interpreted: When beauticians, musicians, and mechanics are all men

By P. Gygax, Ute Gabriel, Oriane Sarrasin, Jane Oakhill, A. Garnham. 2008

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The influence of stereotype and grammatical information (masculine intended as generic) on the representation of gender in language was investigated using a sentence evaluation paradigm. The first sentence introduced a role name (e.g., The spies came out …) and the second sentence contained explicit information about the gender of one or more of the characters (e.g., …one of the women …). The experiment was conducted in French, German, and English. In contrast to English, stereotypicality of role names had no influence on readers’ male biased representations in French and German, where interpretations were dominated by the masculinity of the masculine (allegedly) intended as generic.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc7dbcfea5bcf03606966f6c1118de3d0e055be9

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

1. Lauren Ackerman
2. Hal Daumé Iii
3. Yang Trista Cao

In Language and Linguistics

1. Lauren Ackerman
2. Marco Turchi
3. Matteo Negri
4. Hal Daumé Iii
5. Yang Trista Cao

Citations in the corpus

• Gender Bias in Machine Translation (2021, background): “Such assumptions impact our perceptions (Hamilton, 1988; Gygax et al., 2008; Kreiner et al., 2008) and influence our behavior (e.”
• Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference (2019, background): “This may be illustrated by the strong gender biases of many English occupational terms (e.g., Garnham, Oakhill & Reynolds 2002; Kennison & Trofe 2003; Duffy & Keir 2004; Gygax et al. 2008; Kreiner, Sturt & Garrod 2008).”