Abstract
The way media depict women and men can reinforce or diminish gender stereotyping. Which part does language play in this context? Are roles perceived as more gender-balanced when feminine role nouns are used in addition to masculine ones? Research on gender-inclusive language shows that the use of feminine-masculine word pairs tends to increase the visibility of women in various social roles. For example, when speakers of German were asked to name their favorite “heroine or hero in a novel,” they listed more female characters than when asked to name their favorite “hero in a novel.” The research reported in this article examines how the use of gender-inclusive language in news reports affects readers’ own usage of such forms as well as their mental representation of women and men in the respective roles. In the main experiment, German participants (N = 256) read short reports about heroes or murderers which contained either masculine generics or gender-inclusive forms (feminine-masculine word pairs). Gender-inclusive forms enhanced participants’ own usage of gender-inclusive language and this resulted in more gender-balanced mental representations of these roles. Reading about “heroines and heroes” made participants assume a higher percentage of women among persons performing heroic acts than reading about “heroes” only, but there was no such effect for murderers. A post-test suggested that this might be due to a higher accessibility of female exemplars in the category heroes than in the category murderers. Importantly, the influence of gender-inclusive language on the perceived percentage of women in a role was mediated by speakers’ own usage of inclusive forms. This suggests that people who encounter gender-inclusive forms and are given an opportunity to use them, use them more themselves and in turn have more gender-balanced mental representations of social roles.
Highlights
When we open a newspaper, we often encounter headlines such as “Hometown driver a local hero” or “A lot of heroes around here.” We may come across a headline that reads “While at war, female soldiers fight to belong” (New York Times, 25 May 2015)
For each participant we built an index: we computed the proportion of gender-inclusive language by dividing all gender-inclusive forms by all forms used for person reference
Participants used more genderinclusive language when writing about heroism
Summary
When we open a newspaper, we often encounter headlines such as “Hometown driver a local hero” or “A lot of heroes around here.” We may come across a headline that reads “While at war, female soldiers fight to belong” (New York Times, 25 May 2015). What images of men and women do such newspaper articles create? Gender-Inclusive Language in Media Reports these images? We studied the effects of using either only masculine or both masculine and feminine role nouns in newspaper articles. A large body of research documents that women are less visible in the media in general: only 13% of all news stories are about women (Macharia et al, 2010). The media often depict women and men in a stereotyped manner, with 46% of news stories reinforcing gender stereotypes, and only 6% challenging such stereotypes (Macharia et al, 2010). Gender stereotypes that prevail in a society are reflected in the media, but the media influence how women and men are perceived in the respective society. A series of studies showed that readers of an article that stressed biological explanations of gender differences endorsed gender stereotypes more strongly than readers of a similar article that focused more on sociocultural explanations for gender differences (Brescoll and LaFrance, 2004)
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