Warm-hearted businessmen, competitive housewives? Effects of gender-fair language on adolescents' perceptions of occupations.

Dries Vervecken,Ute Gabriel,Pascal M Gygax,Bettina Hannover,Matthias Guillod

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01437

Abstract

Recent studies from countries with grammatical gender languages (e.g., French) found both children and adults to more frequently think of female jobholders and to consider women’s success in male dominated occupations more likely when the jobs were described in pair forms (i.e., by explicit reference to male and female jobholders, e.g., inventeuses et inventeurs; French feminine and masculine plural forms for inventors), rather than masculine only forms (e.g., inventors). To gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, we systematically varied the gender connotation of occupations (males overrepresented, females overrepresented, equal share of males and females) and measured additional dependent variables, predicting that gender fair language would reduce the impact of the gender connotation on participants’ perceptions. In a sample of 222 adolescents (aged 12–17) from French speaking Switzerland, we found that pair forms attenuated the difference in the ascription of success to male and female jobholders in gendered occupations and attenuated the differential ascription of warmth to prototypical jobholders in male vs. female dominated jobs. However, no effect of language form on the ascription of competence was found. These findings suggest that language policies are an effective tool to impact gendered perceptions, however, they also hint at competence-related gender stereotypes being in decline.

Highlights

In recent years, the use of so-called gender-fair language has been strongly promoted
Considering the findings described above, we speculated that if it is a profession in which one gender is overrepresented, people should be less inclined to ascribe the characteristics of that occupation to the respective gender group, as the pair form makes them think of both genders when describing the prototypical job holder
Differential Ascription of Success to Male and Female Jobholders in Gendered Occupations To test our first hypothesis that language forms would impact the ascription of success to men and women, we conducted a 2 (Form: Pair form vs. Masculine only) × 2 (Gender of respondent: Female vs. Male) × 3 (Assumed gender distribution within occupations: Female vs. Male vs. Neutral) factorial mixed ANOVA on the Perceived success of men and women, with Age as a covariate, Form and Gender of respondent as between-participant factors and Assumed gender distribution as a within-participant factor

Summary

Introduction

The use of so-called gender-fair language has been strongly promoted. For example Formanowicz et al (2013) demonstrated adolescents’ perceptions of these occupations With both invented (Studies 1–2) and existing (Study 3) job we wanted to replicate the finding of previous studies conducted titles that female applicants described with a feminine job title with children or adults, which show that linguistic forms were evaluated as being less competent than applicants described impact the perception of the extent to which women and men with a masculine job title. Adolescents from two different schools in Porrentruy (French perceptions of what is required to pursue different professions are speaking part of Switzerland) took part in this experiment (mean often biased by gender stereotypes (e.g., Crawley, 2014), which age = 14; range = 12–17; 114 female, 107 male, one participant are a result of associating occupations with one of the two genders did not indicate his/her gender).

Approximately equally distributed

Results

Gendered Ascriptions of Warmth and Competence

Practical Relevance of Our Findings