Language and (the estimates of) the gender wage gap

Velde, Lucas van der; Tyrowicz, Joanna; Siwińska, Joanna

doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2015.08.014

Cited by 27 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Guiora, Beit‐Hallahmi, Fried, and Yoder () found that higher “gender loading” in the grammar of a language was associated with stronger gender identity in young children. Finally, van der Velde, Tyrowicz, and Siwinska () reported that grammatical gender marking correlated positively with the gender wage gap. In particular, the existing studies presented previously show that a language's grammatical gender distinctions are strongly associated with a lack of opportunities for women in institutions, organizations, and markets.…”

Section: Research Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 98%

Encouraging environmental sustainability through gender:Amicro‐foundational approach using linguistic gender marking

et al. 2017

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While studies show that organizational diversity is beneficial to their practice of environmental sustainability, we know very little about the effect that the gender of an individual director can have on sustainability practice. In this empirical paper, we employ a micro-foundational approach to examine whether the number of women on an organization's board of directors has a direct effect on its attitude towards environmental sustainability, regardless of the national culture in which the organization is located. Culture in this study is measured through grammatical gender marking, a unique approach to measuring women-oriented cultural effects. Previous studies show that certain cultures have more gender roles than others do, which in turn affect general and organizational behavior in that society. Grammatical gender marking enables us to study the impact of gender of the individual director on the organization's attitude towards environmental sustainability across cultures, by empirically examining data from 71 countries, sampling 4500 organizations for multiple years and industries. Our findings show that organizations become significantly more proactive in environmental sustainability with the appointment of even one woman to the board of directors, regardless of the local culture. We further show that the organization's level of disclosure regarding its sustainability activities increases with the number of women on the board of directors. Our data also show a significantly negative relationship between various gender-based language indices and the presence of women on the board of directors. In cultures defined by a language that has clear grammatical gender markings, there is a tendency to appoint fewer women to boards of directors, thereby influencing indirectly the organization's attitude towards environmental sustainability.

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Section: Research Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 98%

Encouraging environmental sustainability through gender:Amicro‐foundational approach using linguistic gender marking

et al. 2017

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“…For instance, utilizing EEG, it has been demonstrated that languages can influence cognitions non-consciously, since one uses language continuously and the influence can occur without awareness (Boutonnet, Athanasopoulos, & Thierry, 2012). In countries of the world where gendered language is spoken, women earn lower wages (van der Velde, Tyrowicz, & Siwinska, 2015) and face more barriers to participating in the political arena (Santacreu-Vasut, Shoham, & Gay, 2013).…”

Section: Theoretical Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Language Shapes Prejudice Against Women: An Examination Across 45 World Languages

DeFranza¹,

Mishra²,

Mishra³

2020

Preprint

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Language provides an ever-present context for our cognitions and has the ability to shape them. Languages across the world can be gendered (language in which the form of noun, verb, or pronoun is presented as female or male) versus genderless. In an ongoing debate, one stream of research suggests that gendered languages are more likely to display gender prejudice than genderless languages. However, another stream of research suggests that language does not have the ability to shape gender prejudice. In this research, we contribute to the debate by using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) method which captures the meaning of a word from the context in which it occurs. Using text data from Wikipedia and the Common Crawl project (which contains text from billions of publicly facing websites) across 45 world languages, covering the majority of the world’s population, we test for gender prejudice in gendered and genderless languages. We find that gender prejudice occurs more in gendered rather than genderless languages. Moreover, we examine whether genderedness of language influences the stereotypic dimensions of warmth and competence utilizing the same NLP method.

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“…First, the literature has established a connection between personal pronoun systems and various cultural traits such as individualism, collectivism and social distance (Kashima and Kashima, 1998;Licht et al, 2007;Tabellini, 2008;Davis and Abdurazokzoda, 2016;Davis and Williamson, 2016). Second, it has demonstrated that linguistic gender systems affect gender inequalities in a number of domains including labour markets (Mavisakalyan, 2015;van der Velde et al, 2015;Gay et al, 2017), corporate and political leadership (Santacreu-Vasut et al, 2014;Hicks et al, 2016;Jeny and Santacreu-Vasut, 2017), household division of labour (Hicks et al, 2015) and education (Davis and Reynolds, 2018;Galor et al, 2020). Third, and directly relevant to our study, the literature has shown that absence of inflectional future tense affects speakers' inter-temporal preferences (Sutter et al, 2018) and induces more future-oriented behaviours including higher saving (Chen, 2013;Guin, 2015), higher investment in health (Chen, 2013) and education (Galor et al, 2020), higher propensity to become entrepreneurs (Campo et al, 2020), and raised environmental concern and action (Mavisakalyan et al, 2018) at the level of individuals and/or countries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heaven can wait: future tense and religiosity

2021

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This paper identifies a new source of differences in religiosity: the type of future tense marking in language. We argue that the rewards and punishments that incentivise religious behaviour are more effective for speakers of languages without inflectional future tense. Consistent with this prediction, we show that speakers of languages without inflectional future tense are more likely to be religious and to take up the short-term costs associated with religiosity. What is likely to drive this behaviour, according to our results, is the relatively higher appeal of the religious rewards for these individuals. Our analysis is based on within country regressions comparing individuals with identical observable characteristics who speak a different language.

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Language and (the estimates of) the gender wage gap

Cited by 27 publications

References 21 publications

Encouraging environmental sustainability through gender:Amicro‐foundational approach using linguistic gender marking

Encouraging environmental sustainability through gender:Amicro‐foundational approach using linguistic gender marking

How Language Shapes Prejudice Against Women: An Examination Across 45 World Languages

Heaven can wait: future tense and religiosity

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