Title: An Investigation into Sexist Language.
One of the most important political and social movements of the twentieth century has been the drive towards achieving complete equality for all people regardless of race, colour, class, gender identity, mental state or physical impairment. One area that has remained resistant to change is language. While it is has been widely accepted that some aspects of language are clearly sexist, for example the use of "he" as a genderless pronoun (Cameron 1998, Wardaugh 1992, Pauwels 1998), there is still argument as to whether or not changing these forms of language is necessary. Some claim that the use of "politically correct" terms is not only unnecessary but disempowering (Jernigan 1994) because it forces a group of people to refer to themselves by a term that was invented by people who are not of their group. This essay will examine some of the different kinds of linguistic sexism in the English language, some of the reasons why these forms of language are harmful and finally some ideas of how these forms of language can be changed for the better.
As stated above the most obvious example of sexist language is the use of the male pronoun to describe groups of people containing both males and females. For example in the statement "if a child wants to buy some chocolate then he will need some money" the ungendered term "child" is replaced with the gendered pronoun "he" in the latter half of the sentence. On a very basic level this is clearly simply inaccurate since roughly half of the children in the world are female. However the consequences of such usages might go well beyond a simple inaccuracy of language. Graham (1973 in Thorne, Kramarae and Henley 1983, 9-10) conducted a computer analysis of one hundred thousand words from children's schoolbooks and found that "male pronouns outnumbered female ones by almost four to one." It was further found that this was not wholly due to the use of the masculine pronoun as a generic: "97 percent of the uses of "he" referred male humans or animals, or to persons presumed to be male" (the examples he cites are sailors and farmers).
