How fair is gender-fair language? Insights from gender ratio estimations in French

Heated societal debates in various countries concern the use of gender-fair language, meant to replace the generic use of grammatically masculine forms. Advocates and opponents of gender-fair language disagree on – among other things – the question of whether masculine forms leave women underrepresented in people’s minds. We investigated the influence of linguistic form on the mental representations of gender in French. Participants read a short text about a professional gathering and estimated the percentages of men and women present at the gathering. Results showed higher estimates of the percentage of women in response to two gender-fair forms relative to the masculine form. Comparisons with normed data on people’s perception of real-world gender ratios additionally showed that the gender-fair forms removed or reduced a male bias for neutral- and female-stereotyped professions, respectively, yet induced a female bias for male-stereotyped professions. Thus, gender-fair language increases the prominence of women in the mind, but has varying effects on consistency, i.e., the match with default perceptions of real-world gender ratios.

多国社会围绕性别公平语言（gender-fair language）的使用展开了激烈辩论，这种语言旨在替代语法上阳性形式的泛指用法。性别公平语言的支持者与反对者在多个问题上存在分歧，其中之一便是阳性形式是否会导致女性在人们的认知中代表性不足。我们研究了法语中语言形式对性别心理表征的影响。参与者阅读了一篇关于专业聚会的短文，并估算了聚会中男性和女性的占比。结果显示，相较于阳性形式，两种性别公平形式引发了参与者对女性占比更高的估算。与人们对现实世界性别比例感知的标准化数据对比后进一步发现，性别公平形式分别消除或减少了中性职业和女性刻板印象职业中的男性偏见，但却在男性刻板印象职业中引发了女性偏见。因此，性别公平语言提升了女性在认知中的显著性，但对一致性（即与现实世界性别比例默认感知的匹配度）的影响则各不相同。