Linguistic Origins of Gender Equality and Women’s Rights

Abstract

In this article, we examine how the language spoken in a country can affect individual attitudes about gender equality and subsequently the level of legal rights afforded to women. This is because the feature of a language—specifically whether it requires speakers to make gender distinctions—can perpetuate popular attitudes and beliefs about gender inequality. To test this argument, we first identify a correlation between the gender distinction of a language and individual gender-based attitudes among World Values Survey respondents. We then isolate the causal mechanism using an experiment involving bilingual Romanian–Hungarian speakers in Transylvania, Romania. Finally, we examine one observable implication of our argument: the effects of gender distinction of official state languages on women’s rights at the national level. Our results confirm the importance of the gender distinction of language on support for gender equality and women’s rights.

Pronouns Beyond the Binary: The Change of Attitudes and Use Over Time

“…Gender and language are connected (Boroditsky 2011;Sapir, 1944;Whorf, 1956). On aggregated levels, national languages also correspond with gender equality (Liu et al 2018;Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell, and Laakso 2012;Santacreu-Vasut, Shenkar, and Shoham 2014), such that countries with official languages that display feminine or masculine gender are less gender equal; these language users are less supportive of gender equality and women's rights. Moreover, gender-fair language use motivates individuals to apply for certain jobs in which their gender is in minority (Bem and Bem 1973;Horvath and Sczesny 2016).…”

Language difference and regional authority

“…Language difference can indicate the existence of a distinctive way of life. Those who speak a different language may have, in Kymlicka's words (1988, 83), 'a shared vocabulary of tradition and convention' which can reach deep into a community and shape an individual's views on social and political norms (Liu et al 2018;Singh 2015).…”

“…13 We codify what the majority of a region's population indicate as their so-called 'mother tongue,' i.e. the chief language that a person grows up with in childhood (Liu et al 2018). Where data availability allows, reported language is averaged over the course of the past three decades, and triangulated with information from census data, Ethnologue, Wikipedia, and secondary sources.…”

Neutralising linguistic sexism: Promising but cumbersome?

“…Research investigating the relationships between language structures and the salience of gender categories more broadly, however, is very limited (Liu, Shair-Rosenfield, Vance, & Csata, 2017; Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell, & Laakso, 2012), and does not yet allow for firm conclusions on whether the social category of gender perceptually and/or cognitively surfaces more easily for speakers of gender-based languages than for speakers of other languages. Still, in line with self-categorisation theory (e.g., Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), one could assume that such saliency might compel language users to self-stereotype, leading to an intensification of gender differences.…”