Masculine Words Research Articles

An automatic red-female association tested by the Stroop task

Colors have been reported to be associated with genders (e.g., reddish color—females). Here, we investigated color-gender associations (red-female/green-male) among Japanese participants using two Stroop-word categorization tasks. Ten Japanese gendered words were chosen as visual stimuli. In Experiment 1 (N = 23), participants were instructed to indicate whether a target word presented in either red, green, or gray font color was a masculine or feminine word. Results showed a congruency effect of red-female association that red font color facilitated the categorization of feminine words and inhibited the categorization of masculine words compared to other colors. No significant effect of green-male association was observed. Experiment 2 (N = 23 newly recruited participants) examined whether the congruency effect of color-gender associations could bias perceptual font color categorization. Participants were asked to discriminate whether the font color, with low saturation, was red or green while ignoring the word's meaning. Results showed that participants responded faster and made fewer errors when categorizing red font colors for feminine words than masculine words. Additionally, a congruent effect of green-male association on performance accuracy was observed, although it did not affect response times. These results indicate the existence of an automatically activated red-female association, which can influence both conceptual gender categorization and perceptual color processing.

Creating a Chinese gender lexicon for detecting gendered wording in job advertisements

It is widely assumed that gendered wording in job advertisements can be a source of unconscious gender bias that contributes to occupational gender segregation, and gender lexicons have been developed and employed to detect gendered wording in job advertisements. The goal of this study is to create a Chinese job advertisement gender lexicon, the lack of which has impeded related research in China. Based on 53,786 job advertisements collected from a large employment website in China, the lexicon creation process enabled by supervised learning mainly involved identifying candidate gender words and determining their gender scores. The combination of Word2Vec and SVR yielded the highest performance and generated a new Chinese gender lexicon consisting of 1,429 masculine words and 1,064 feminine words with varying gender scores. The lexicon was successfully applied in gendered wording detection, revealing that masculinely and femininely worded job advertisements dominated different occupations in China. The superiority of the proposed lexicon creation method and the resultant lexicon are verified through comparisons.

Evolution of the dative, instrumental and locative plural forms in *ŏ/*jŏ-declension based on Old Russian monuments of business writing

The article examines one of the morphological innovations in Old Russian noun declension system, so-called the a-expansion, as a result of which the words of all declensions acquired inflections with the formant -a- (-амъ, -ами, -ахъ) in the dative, instrumental and locative plural forms. An analysis of the relevant *ŏ/*jŏ-stem noun forms, which were found in the five studied corpora of Old Russian business writing monuments of different geographical origin, made it possible to reveal several patterns in the development of this process that are significant for historical morphology. Thus, the data show that the a-expansion either was evolving more slowly in the instrumental case than in the dative and locative cases or was less often reflected in writing. Based on the studied material, the article concludes that neuter nouns could succumb to the a-expansion faster than masculine words. In addition, the data of the studied texts allowed assuming that the a-expansion began earlier and was evolving faster in the northwest, while in the central zone this process proceeded slower.

An example of the variant suffixes -ica and -ka in feminatives derived from masculine words ending in -or and -ator

The article examines feminatives as a semantic and word-formation category. In Slavic languages feminatives are mainly regarded as modificational derivatives formed from masculine derivatives by the whole replacement of the masculine suffix (bor-(-ec/-k?), partial replacement of the masculine suffix (bra-l/(-ec/-ka), or by adding the feminine suffix to the masculine suffix (miz-ar/-ka). Due to the expansion of global communication through mass media, the inevitable broadening of vocabulary requires the adaptation of borrowed words to the morphemic, morphological and word-formation paradigms of the borrowing language. As a consequence, it comes as no surprise that feminatives formed from the same masculine base often have two or more variants of feminine suffixes (dekan-ica - dekan-ka - dekan-ja). Three examples of variant feminine suffixes -ica and -ka added to masculine nouns ending in suffixes -or and -ator, which are of foreign origin, are examined in this paper. The purpose of the study is to establish which of the feminine suffixes are more productive and how they conform to the established patterns. The examined cases of masculine formations using the borrowed suffixes -or and its variant -ator (in addition to -tor, -itor and -utor) in the semantic category of living beings show variability in languages such as Slovene, Serbian and Slovakian, which are dependent on the existence of an appropriate nominal or verbal base in the language. In Slovene, such formations are consistently deverbal, while in Serbian and Slovakian they are either denominal or deverbal. The study focuses on three masculine formations koordinator, selektor and senator, and examines how their suffixes combine with the feminine suffix variants (-ka and -ica). The established pattern in Slovene predicts that masculine formations in -ator will form feminatives by adding the suffix -ka, while masculine formations in -or will form feminatives by adding the suffix -ica. In the example of the words koordinator- ka (from koordin-ator) and selektor-ica (from selekt-or), the usage confirms this pattern. However, there is a deviation from this pattern in the example of senatorka (from senat-or), where the feminative senator-ica would be predicted. The study offers a possible answer to the question of such deviations from the predictable patterns in contrast to the actual use of feminative suffixes. It is clear that language users are guided by different analogies when they form words. Although these analogies may not be linguistically supported, they are important in motivating the formation of many new words, especially those from borrowed bases. The language user depends on the recognition of the formal structure of the word to be able to choose a predictable word-formation pattern. In borrowed words, such formal structure is less clear, since it is based on foreign word-formation patterns with foreign root and derivational morphemes.

Is There Gender Bias in Radiology Job Postings?

BackgroundWords can convey subtle cultural stereotypes and perpetuate subconscious gender biases. Wording in job advertisements that appeals to 1 gender and deters others may unintentionally skew the applicant pool and affect the early phase of the recruitment process. “Masculine” tone can lead to decreased interest among women applicants while ‘feminine’ wording may not affect a man's decision to apply for the job. In this study, we evaluated the presence and extent of subtle gender bias in job advertisements for radiology faculty positions. MethodsAll job postings for faculty radiologists were retrieved from the American College of Radiology Career Center website in July 2020. The complete job advertisement was analyzed using Gender Decoder, a publicly available web-based application, to determine number and percentage of female or male coded words and the overall tone of the ad. The job posts were also stratified by subspecialty, leadership positions and academic versus private practice environments. ResultsOf the 623 job postings reviewed, a little over half (52.0%) of job postings were feminine coded, 26.6% had a masculine tone and 21.3% had a neutral tone. Of the leadership (division director) positions, 50.0% (4/8) had a masculine tone, 37.5% had a feminine tone, and 12.5% had a neutral tone. Among various specialties, pediatric radiology had the lowest percentage of job posts with a masculine tone (10.5%) while nuclear medicine had the highest percentage (41.7%). The most commonly used feminine words were: “support,” “responsible,” “commitment” and the most common masculine words were: “competitive,” “leader,” “active.” ConclusionsMost of the imaging job advertisements were feminine coded, with masculine tone in overall 26.6% posts and neutral tone in about a fifth. Leadership posts had a higher percentage of masculine tone. Awareness of these biases is important to enable diversity in recruitment and to ensure a diverse applicant pool.

Flertalsformer af ari-ord i den færøske talesprogsbank

The aim of this article is to investigate dialectal variation of plural endings of ari-words in Faroese, i.e., masculine words with ari-ending in singular. Such words for example lærari ‘teacher’ may get different plural endings in spoken Faroese: ar, ir, a, and R (lærarar, lærarir, lærara, læraR). In the written language there is only one correct plural form which is ar: lærarar. The empirical material in this article is picked up from a corpus of spoken language, Føroyskur talumálsbanki, which is a corpus management and analysis system for annotated corpora. The article is also a study of the usability of the corpus concerning dialectal variation in spoken Faroese. The result of the correlation shows that the non-standardized ir-variant is most frequent in the corpus. Here I investigate the variation by correlating them with two non-linguistic variables, place, and age.

Роль феминитивов в коммуникативных практиках вчера и сегодня

The article is devoted to the problem of considering feminitives from a linguistic and communicative point of view, discussing the question of how natural or artificial the use of the words of this group is in different situations of interpersonal communication. Feminitives have existed in Russian speech for a long time, but their use was extremely inconsistent and remains so to this day. Currently, the discourse on feminitives is one of the most relevant in communication science and linguistics, in new speech and communication practices. In modern Russian, two opposite linguistic tendencies coexist. On the one hand, the formation of correlates to masculine words denoting professions, i.e. active use of feminitives in speech, and, on the other hand, the use of masculine words regardless of gender. As illustrations, the exhibits of the art exhibition, composed of the works of A. Deineka and A. Samokhvalov, are used, in the canvases of which not only visually, pictorially and graphically, the era is reflected, but the language of time is fixed verbally: the names of a large number of paintings, sketches and sculptures are feminitives. In addition, contemporary literary and cinematic texts are also cited as examples.

Representation for whom? Transformation of sex/gender discussion from stereotypes to silence in Finnish biology textbooks from 20th to 21th century

ABSTRACT Sex/gender is an interesting phenomenon in biological and social sciences. It is characterised by constant redefinitions and conflicts as knowledge increases and social norms change. To understand the change in sex/gender representations in biology education, we analysed Finnish secondary school human biology textbooks from the 1990s until the most recent books. We classified the depictions of sex/gender differences and their explanations in texts and illustrations. We also composed stereotypes of men and women and calculated the number of feminine and masculine words. Contrary to previous studies, this study shows that feminine words were more numerous due to reproduction being closely linked to the word ‘mother’. Biology textbooks mostly outline biological sex differences and explain them with hormones. While we found fewer sex/gender stereotypes and inclusion of sex/gender diversity in the recent textbooks, there was a decreasing trend on discussing sex/gender. These changes can partly be explained by curricular changes and the emergence of an additional subject, health studies, which has led to emphasising binary biological sex/gender in biology. We suggest that our results shine a light on a process where ‘queer’ is partially included in hegemony but which does not question the hegemony through critical discussion and scientific knowledge.

Stereotyping Ourselves: Gendered Language Use in Management and Instruction Library Job Advertisements

Are librarians perpetuating their own stereotypes? This study analyzed 460 job advertisements of instruction librarian and management positions in academic libraries for the use of gendered language. Most (88%) of the collected advertisements used more feminine-themed language in their position descriptions, meaning there are more feminine-themed words than masculine-themed or no masculine words at all. Within the instruction positions, 95% were feminine-themed while 13% of the management positions were masculine-themed. This study found the largest use of masculine-themed language appeared in management positions. Hiring organizations can work toward balanced gender representation in library leadership by identifying the current use of gendered language in their own job advertisements.

An ERP Study of the Temporal Course of Gender-Color Stroop Effect.

Pink and blue colors have been found to associate with gender stereotypes in previous Western studies. The purpose of the present study was to explore the neuropsychological processing basis of this effect in contemporary Chinese society. We presented stereotypically masculine or feminine occupation words in either pink or blue colors to Chinese college students in a modified Stroop paradigm, in which participants were asked to classify each occupation word by gender as quickly and accurately as possible. Event-related potential (ERP) signals were concurrently recorded in order to identify the temporal dynamics of gender stereotypical interference effect. The behavioral results showed that pink–masculine stimuli elicited a longer response time and lower accuracy than blue–masculine stimuli in the participants, while no such differences were observed between pink–feminine and blue–feminine conditions. The ERP results further revealed distinctive neural processing stages for pink–masculine stimuli (i.e., in comparison to the other three types of stimuli) in P200, N300, N400, and P600. Overall, our results suggested that pink but not blue was a “gendered” color in Chinese culture. Moreover, our ERP findings contributed to the understanding of the neural mechanism underlying the processing of gender–color stereotypes.

The gender congruency effect across languages in bilinguals: A meta-analysis.

In the study of gender representation and processing in bilinguals, two contrasting perspectives exist: integrated versus autonomous (Costa, Kovacic, Franck, & Caramazza, 2003,Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 181-200). In the former, cross-linguistic interactions during the selection of grammatical gender values are expected; in the latter, they are not. To address this issue, authors have typically explored the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect (GCE; a facilitation on the naming or translation of second language [L2] nouns when their first language [L1] translations are of the same gender, in comparison to those of a different gender). However, the literature suggests that this effect is sometimes difficult to observe and might vary as a function of variables, such as the syntactic structure produced to translate or name the target (bare nouns vs. noun phrases), the phonological gender transparency of both languages (whether or not they have phonological gender cues associated with the ending letter-e.g., "-a" for feminine words and "-o" for masculine words in Romance languages), the degree of L2 proficiency, and task requirements (naming vs. translation). The aim of the present quantitative meta-analysis is to examine the robustness of the cross-linguistic GCE obtained during language production. It involves 25 experiments from 11 studies. The results support a bilingual gender-integrated view, in that they show a small but significant GCE regardless of the variables mentioned above.

КОСМЕТОЛОГИНЯ И АДВОКАТЕССА: БУДУЩЕЕ ИЛИ РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА?

The article is devoted to feminitives as a linguistic phenomenon studied by gender linguistics. A large number of new feminitives in modern Russian language denotes the relevance of specific names for females, despite the tendency to use masculine words as general words in official speech. The most frequent feminitives are the names of female persons by profession or occupation. The results of a pilot experiment aimed at detecting the use of feminitives when referring to women of certain professions are presented. All data is divided into several groups. The first group consists of professions with a more frequent use of feminitives than names in the masculine grammatical gender.The second group is the one where some of the feminitives are found in dictionaries labeled “colloquial”. The third group includes cases when feminitives exist, but the respondents formed them in a different way using frequency derivational models.

Can Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Affect the Proportion of Female Managers?

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect the wording of job advertisements has on the proportion of women in organizations. The focus is on masculine and feminine words, which are words a...

Introduction to Special Issue on Gender and Leadership and a Future Research Agenda

Despite the feminisation of universities in terms of their student intake [1,2], formal positions of academic leadership in higher education remain concentrated in male hands[…]

Personal names in Modern Hebrew: A morphosyntactic and gender analysis

AbstractThe article presents a morphosyntactic analysis of personal names in Modern Hebrew, with emphasis on gender characteristics. In fact, Hebrew uses existing words for personal names, and we would expect grammatical rules to apply to names in the same manner as they apply to other words. Almost all words in the language are gender distinguished, meaning that they must be either masculine or feminine, with no neuter form, and full syntactic agreement for gender is required. While masculine words are unmarked, feminine nouns, adjectives, and participles are marked by the suffixes -

‘You know how tough I am?’ Discourse analysis of US Midwestern congresswomen’s self-presentation

Drawing on gender-role theories and considering the potential new media environments brought to the dynamics of strategic political communication, this study explores the nature of US Midwestern congresswomen’s strategic online self-presentations in comparison to those of congressmen. The discourse analysis presented in this study shows that in their official online biographies, that is, as given on websites provided by the US government, congresswomen devoted more space to describing their own personal traits than did congressmen. In particular, women tended to stress the masculine aspects of their personalities by using so-called masculine words such as tough and fighter much more than their male counterparts did. Such masculine terminology was scarcely evident in the biographies of male House members in the same states and committees as the female members. These findings imply that female politicians are more active in strategically presenting themselves as tough leaders in what appears to be a self-conscious effort to counteract detrimental gender stereotypes.

Retention of Feminine and Masculine Words by Iranian EFL Learners

The main concern of the present study was to probe the probable differences between Iranian male and female EFL learners in learning and retention of feminine and masculine words. It was an attempt to investigate whether males and females EFL learners differ significantly in learning and recalling feminine and masculine words. To carry out this study, a total of 32 male and female subjects of Iran language institute in Arak were randomly selected from among two groups of males and females. A vocabulary test and a background questionnaire were administrated to both groups. According to statistical analyses: No significant difference was observed between males and females in masculine and feminine words retention.

La formació del plural i la situació del gènere en el "Curial e Güelfa" dins del context del segle XV

We study the situation of plurals in the «Curial e Guelfa» and, by extension, in the Catalan of the 15th century, analyzing particularly the possible subordinating factors of the distribution of plurals -es and -os of masculine words that finish in -s. The situation of plurals helps to confirm the dating of the novel in the middle of the 15th century. On the other hand, in the section of inflection of gender, the presence of forms that confirm the classicism of the novel is evident, as well as some Valencian preferences.

THE PROCESSING OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER AND NUMBER IN SPANISH

The aim of the present study is to explore the representation and processing of inflectional morphology in Spanish. Experiment 1 compared the access time for words from the same base morpheme contrasted by the surface frequency of the masculine and feminine form, i.e., masculine-dominant items and feminine-dominant items. The results showed a surface frequency effect in both types of items. Experiment 2 compared the access time for masculine words having the same surface frequency but differing in their summed frequency (masculine plus feminine forms), the results showing no significant effect of this parameter. Finally, experiment 3 compared the access time for words from the same stem and contrasting by the surface frequencies for the singular and plural forms, i.e., singular-dominant and plural-dominant words. A clear frequency effect was observed for the singular-dominant words but not for plural-dominant ones. These results suggest that gender information is stored in the corresponding lexical entry and accessed from the full word form whereas the information about number is accessed from the stem corresponding to the singular form.

Attribution of gender to a gender-unspecified individual: An evaluation of the people = male hypothesis

J. Silveira [(1980), “Generic Masculine Words and Thinking,” Women's Studies International Quarterly, Vol. 3, pp. 165–178] suggested that most individuals adopt a “people = male” bias evidenced by gender-unspecified individuals being attributed male gender. We evaluated whether subject gender, subject status on the Bem Sex Role Inventory [BSRI; S. L. Bem (1974), “The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 42, pp. 155–162], or situational context would affect the likelihood of subjects attributing male gender to a gender-unspecified individual. College students of primarily European-American descent (82 females and 85 males) read one of three dialogue scripts. Following memory distraction tasks, subjects attributed gender to the target character. Across scripts, there was a strong people = male bias, as subjects were more likely to attribute male, rather than female, gender to the target character. Neither subject gender or BSRI classification affected this bias. Situational context in the scripts had a marginally significant effect.