Attitudes About Gender Revealed by the English Language

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Attitudes About Gender Revealed by the English Language

Throughout the age of language different attitudes are revealed about

both men and women. This can be presented by the fact that a-lot of

terms used to refer to the women of the world, contain the man men or

male for example the world female, women or the word woman all contain

the world man or male and just have a simple prefix attached. There

are also a-lot of words that are used to represent women, which are

degrading and derogatory, whereas with men there are not many words

like these. These examples would imply that the English language is

biased towards men being the more important gender. This essay will

explore further the ways that this can be seen throughout the English

language.

Default assumptions are a good case of this: A default assumption is

when you hear a word and assume that it’s a certain thing in this case

gender. For example most people would associate a male with a surgeon,

a female with a sectary, a male with a builder or a female with a

beautician. From these examples one would explain that default

assumptions might possibly of come about by historical employment

patterns. Or perhaps representation because of things such as

children’s books where a Doctor was almost always a man and therefore

it would have been programmed into that child’s mind from a young age

that a doctor was a man and once they go past the stage where what

sociologists call the “window of opportunity” they find it difficult

if not impossible to think otherwise.

There are words that are “women’s terms” and “men’s terms” which are

used to refer to the appropriate gender. However when put into a study

it was determined that the woman’s terms are mainly insulting, words

like cow, bird, minger, slapper, and more vulgar and derogatory words

are normally used to refer to a woman. Whereas the words used to refer

to a male are typically words like: bloke, guy, geezer, mate, mush or

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