NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY BANGLADESH 

How Language is promoting gender disparities

A Term Paper 
Presented to
The Department of English 
Notre Dame University Bangladesh

In Partial Fulfilment 
Of the Requirement for the degree 
Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature
By 
Fahmid Anwar Navid
ID: 181030014

Supervised by:
Mithun Rozario
Lecturer, Department of English, NDUB
January 11th, 2023
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Title
“How Language is promoting gender disparities”
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Table of Content

Serial No: Content Page No:

1 Introduction 04

2 Literature Review 05-08

3 Research Methodology 09

4 Findings 10

5 Discussion 11-19

6 Recommendation and 20
Conclusion

7 References 21-22
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1. Introduction

Language is the reflection of social cultures. It is also the encyclopedia of social behaviors.
People are not very conscious of the language they’re using. But a body of evidence suggests
that how people use gendered words, including personal pronouns, not only expresses their
beliefs around gender but also shapes the way they see the social world and their place in it as a
woman or a man. When people hear these word order choices, they read them as cues indicating
the relevance of the people described by them. Word order can both convey and reinforce gender
beliefs.

The motivation behind this Research is conducted to identify problems or to find answers to
uncertainties.

In this research paper, we will find out that, how language influences gender inequality, why it
influences and how can we overcome from it.
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2. Literature Review

2.1. The Deficit Theory: Robin Lakoff is a major figure of the deficit theory in her
book Language and women’s place in 1975. In her opinion, language reflects and
strengthens the social convention. The difference languages of male and female are
the mirror of their different roles in society. The gender difference in language reveals
the inequality of females' social status. The inequality in language cannot be
eliminated unless there is no inequality in social status and powers. In patriarchal
society, male speaking structure is viewed as standards and criterion while female
speaking structure is the deviation and intention, which implies that a female
indeed.is an imperfection existence in society. Besides, she points that “the defection
of female language is the result of role socialization” (Lakoff ,1996). However, with
the development of society, the social status and roles of female have witnessed great
changes. This point is neglected by Lakoff.

2.2. The Dominance Theory: It is D. Zimmer-man, C. West and P. Fishman who

hold the view of dominance theory. They think that females have no social positions
so that females, who live in a passive position, are always be dominated. For
example, when females are talking with the opposite sex, they are always be
interrupted and be limited to a certain topic and time. According to their studies, in
terms of talking method and strategy, the males tend to a strong domination and
prefer to control the topic and talking turns so that the females are interrupted
frequently. The males enjoy their dominant position while talking. Usually when the
females are interrupted by males, they always choose the silence instead of fighting it
out for the right to speak. The inequality social power and influence lead to the
imbalance position in the communication between males and females.
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2.3. The Difference Theory: According to the difference theory, there is an obvious
gender difference in the language due to the different subculture backgrounds of
males and females. Goodwin (1980) once conducts a survey between two children’s
groups and draw a conclusion that girls and boys share different group characters. It
is consistent with the opinion of folklores that the speaking style of males is tend to
hard-edged and competitive while the females are implicit and indirect. Different
from Lakoff’s view, the culture difference holders point that what important is the
different speaking styles of females, not the imperfection of females. Therefore, this
theory wins the support of many scholars who study the gender and language,
especially the female scholars. It is widely used to explain the misunderstanding
during the communication between males and females. American linguist Tannen
(1990) points out that the male and females, who come from the same culture
background and speak the same language, tend to live in conflicts due to the different
customs of using language. Traditionally the male is viewed as a strong person and
protector while the female is viewed as the weak and the protected. Therefore, the
male and female form their own speaking characters correspond to their social
acquirements and expectations. It can be seen from the speaker’s tendency, content
and ways of expressing. The speaking topic of males is wilder than the females which
relates to social, politics, politics and sports.

2.4. Margit Tavitsa, and Efrén O. Pérez has written an article on, ‘Language
influences mass opinion toward gender’, In the article, they say, “Many nations
across the globe, gender inequality persists, and men still predominate in society, the
economy, and politics (1, 2). One reason for these tenacious disparities is the ubiquity
of patriarchal attitudes and beliefs, which privilege males as an orthodox and
ascendant social category (1–3). Such views also promote discrimination against
heterodox gender groups, such as gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals (4). To
mitigate these biases, many governments have adopted policies that enshrine gender
parity and inclusion, such as in-creased female access to education and employment
(5), widened childcare availability (1, 2), reduced gender pay disparities (6), and
quotas to boost female political participation and representation (7). These efforts
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have also spilled into policies ameliorating social and economic discrimination
against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities (8) while
bolstering their political rights (9). In line with these endeavors, many nations have
integrated gender-neutral words into their vocabulary (e.g., police officer instead of
policeman) and promoted gender-neutral pronouns (e.g., they instead of he or she)
(10, 11). Sweden aptly embodies these trends: This country formally incorporated the
gender-neutral pronoun hen into the 2015 Swedish Academy Glossary, which sets
norms for Sweden’s language (12). Thus, a majority of Swedes now use hen
alongside the explicitly gendered hon(she) and han(he) as part of their grammatical
toolkit.

2.5. Aneta Pavlenko and Ingrid Piller has written an article on, ‘Language
Education and Gender’, In the article, “Early research sparked by Lakoff’s (1975)
Language and Woman’s Place and Thorne and Henley’s (1975) Language and Sex:
Difference and Dominance conceptualized the relationship between language and
gender through the notions of difference and dominance, and, implicitly, the notion of
deficit. In the deficit framework, women were viewed as inferior language users and
oftentimes as “the muted group” who speaks a “powerless language.” In the study of
linguistic diversity, this view translated into the linguistic lag hypothesis, the view of
minority women as less bilingual than men, and thus lagging linguistically behind
them (Stevens, 1986). In the dominance framework, theorized in Lakoff (1975) and
Thorne and Henley (1975), “women-as-a-group” were seen as linguistically
oppressed and dominated by “men-as-a-group.” In the study of linguistic diversity,
this view led to an argument that women lag behind because they are linguistically
oppressed by men (Burton, 1994).”

2.6. Tian Lan and Liu Jingxia says on their article, ‘On the Gender Discrimination
in English’, “Gender discrimination” refers to the unequal treatment of one gender
member by the other gender member, especially the male unequal treatment of
women, which holds that one gender is superior to the other (Pearsall, 2001). Roussel
believes that “gender discriminators regard men as gender-privilege and superior to
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woman.” In other words, it is based on the physiological differences between men

and women to identify men and women in terms of social status and economic status.
(Miller C, 1997) Gender discrimination has different manifestations in different
historical periods and cultures. Languages with gender discrimination codes are
called gender discrimination languages or sexist language. Sexist language can have a
variety of definitions. Braggin believes that, “sex discrimination is the construction,
promotion or use of an unjustified or irrelevant distinction between the two sexes.”
From various definitions of gender-discriminatory language by feminists and
linguists, the definition can be summarized as follows: Sexist language refers to
words or sentences that cause mutual degraded or between two genders. In 1913, F.
Mautner pointed out that social and historical reasons determine the existence of
gender differences in languages. After analyzing the communication between people
in different social classes, he found a series of differences in verbal behaviors
between men and women. In 1922, the Danish linguist parsons, in his influential book
Language: It’s Nature, Development and Origin, devoted a chapter to the various
manifestations and characteristics of women’s language, explaining the differences of
women in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure.”
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3. Research Methodology

There are many different approaches when one is dealing with research. However, two of them,
namely quantitative and qualitative, seem to be the most common, prominent and widespread
approaches. On the one hand, quantitative research is the one in which variables are manipulated
to test hypotheses and in which there is usually quantification of data and numerical analyses
(Gass & Mackey, 2005, p. 2).

In this term paper the qualitative method and inductive approaches has been used to complete
writings in his paper. The writer of this term paper has used the primary sources, the text, and
also the secondary sources like a periodical reference book, etc.to analyze the topic. This paper
was on the promoting the gender disparities in English language. This paper focuses on how
men, women and other gender’s language differs from each other’s.
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4. Findings

Language is not sexist, it is the speaker who makes the language sexist and it creates gender
disparities in the modern world, it is continuing since the dawn of civilization. The study of
gender is important to the study of language, and the first step to study gender is to explore the
difference between men and women. It is quite clear that men and women have a lot of
differences in many fields. We can notice that men and women tend to choose different words to
show their feelings.
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5. Discussion

“Language and gender” refer to the relationship between the language of male and female.
Gender difference is not only a reflection of the speeches between male and female, but also a
reflection of their different living styles and attitudes. The dialectologists research into the
changes of language and the decline of some dialects by analyzing the language of some
community. Sociolinguists look gender as a social variable to study the relationship between
language and gender. From their complicated understanding and researches, we can draw a
conclusion that the researchers concerned about the differences between the languages of both
genders in common.

The use of gendered language can often lead to gender inequality, which creates an unfair bias
towards a certain gender. This can result in harmful stereotypes which cause discrimination and
portray a negative view of a certain gender. These stereotypes and negative views are often
directed at women. For many years, women did not have the same rights and opportunities as
men, such as not being able to vote or access certain public places, like pubs. The use of
gendered language has the power to reinforce and maintain male supremacy in society.

In this language community, pronunciation is regarded as a sign of sex. So, if males speak in the
way of a female or females speak in the way of a male, he or she will be looked on as a bi-
sexual. The pronunciation of female is different from that of male to a great degree. In the form
of male-male dialogue, people follow such a kind of rule: if a word is a monosyllabic word or it
is ended with a long vowel, diphthong, or a consonant, males often add a suffix at the end of the
word. There are some researchers who pay more attention to the lexicon.
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Some dialectologists are very interested in the differences between the language of male and
female within their native language. Females are more conservative than males in the respect of
language. The reason is that females almost have never left the place where they lived; females
often stay at home and have a chat with her family members; they seldom have a chance to
contact with strangers. Furthermore, females never serve in the army. So, the dialectologists
believe that females are their ideal research subject not only in studying dialects, but also in
studying language and gender. The language of male can reflect the characteristics of dialects.
Although people usually believe that females are more conservative than males, however, the
language of females is not conservative for that females can accept new vocabulary easily than
males. And the dialectologists also think the true situation between the languages of both genders
can be revealed if they limit their researches to a region in which the economy is not developed
and people there are almost out of touch with the outside world. In this sense, it will become
doubtful that whether their research findings lack of practicability and universality. That is
because the dialectologists have not paid attention to the regions where the economy is
developed and people usually have a contact with outside world.

In sociolinguistics, the relationship between language and gender in many aspects, such as
gender and politeness, gender and language style. Most of the researchers believe that females
are more polite than males. The language of female is indirect and implicit; male’s is direct to the
contrary. Some scholars like Tannen even hold that males and females come from different
culture and the communication between them should be transcultural communication. So, if
failure in communication appears, it is nothing to be surprised at.

Some social dialectologists suggested that women were status conscious, and that this is
explained in their use of standard speech forms. Robin Lakoff, an American linguist, suggested
almost the opposite. She argued that women were using language which reinforced their
subordinate status; they were ‘colluding in their own subordination’ by the way they spoke.
Social dialect research focuses on differences between women’s and men’s speech in the areas of
pronunciation and morphology with some attention to syntactic constructions (such as multiple
negation). Robin Lakoff shifted the focus of research on gender differences to syntax, semantics
and style. She suggested that women’s subordinate social status in US society is indicated by the
language women use, as well as in the language used about them. She identified a number of
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linguistic features which she claimed were used more often by women than by men, and which
in her opinion expressed uncertainty and lack of confidence.

Lakoff suggested that women’s speech was characterized by linguistic features such as the
following.

(a) Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

(b) Tag questions, e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?

(c) Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good.

(d) ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute

(e) Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine

(f) Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much.

(g) ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g., consistent use of standard verb forms.

(h) ‘Super polite’ forms, e.g., indirect requests, euphemisms.

(i) Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. rubbish, my goodness.

(j) Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance.

Lakoff argued that of modifiers were evidence of an unconfident speaker.

• Hedging devices explicitly signal lack of confidence, while boosting devices express the
speaker’s anticipation that the addressee may remain unconvinced and therefore supply
extra reassurance.

• Women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use intensifying devices to
persuade their addressee to take them seriously.

• Women boost the force of their utterances because they think that otherwise they will not
be heard or paid attention to.

• Thus, according to Lakoff, both hedges and boosters’ express women’s lack of
confidence.

Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices:

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Example:1

• Susan is a university student. She is telling her friend and flat-mate about her experiences
at school.

“I did my exams in sixty-three, was it?”

The tag question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff which may express uncertainty as the
example illustrates. Susan is uncertain about the date, and she indicates this with a tag which
signals doubt about what she is asserting. This tag focuses on the referential meaning of Susan’s
assertion – the accuracy of the information she is giving. But tags may also express affective
meaning. They may function as facilitative or positive politeness devices, providing an addressee
with an easy entrée into a conversation.

Example:2

Margaret is holding a small party to introduce a new neighbor, Frank, to other people in the
street. She introduces Frank to an old friend, Andrew.

Margaret: Andrew this is our new neighbor, Frank. Andrew has just changed jobs, haven’t
you?

Andrew: Yes, I am now a well-paid computer programmer instead of a poorly paid

administrative assistant.

Example: 3

Zoe and her mother Claire have just come home from the supermarket. Zoe empties the shopping
basket all over the kitchen floor.

Claire: That was a bit of a silly thing to do, wasn’t it?

Here the tag’s function is not to express uncertainty, but rather affectively to soften the critical
comment, indicating concern for Zoe’s feelings.

Tags may also be used as confrontational and coercive devices. Example 4 is an example of
a tag used to force feedback from an uncooperative addressee.

Example: 4
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A police superintendent is interviewing a detective constable and is criticising the constable’s

performance:

A: . . . you’ll probably find yourself um before the Chief Constable, okay?

B: Yes, Sir, yes, understood.

A: Now you er fully understand that, don’t you?

B: Yes, Sir, indeed, yeah.

From 60,000-word corpus containing equal amounts of female and male speech collected in a
range of matched contexts, it is clear that in this corpus the women used more tags than the men,
as Lakoff predicted.

But more interesting is the fact that women and men used them more often for different
functions. Women put more emphasis than men on the polite or affective functions of tags, using
them as facilitative positive politeness devices. Men, on the other hand, used more tags for the
expression of uncertainty.

Distribution of tag questions by function and sex of speaker:

Function of tag Women% Men %

Expressing uncertainty 61 35

Facilitative 59 26

Softening 13 6

Confrontational – –

Interaction: Despite the widespread stereotype of women as the talkative sex, and proverbs
which characterize women as garrulous (‘Women’s tongues are like lambs’ tails; they are never
still’), most of the research evidence points the other way.
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In a wide range of contexts, particularly non-private ones such as television interviews, staff
meetings and conference discussions, where talking may increase your status, men dominate the
talking time.

Interruptions: The most widely quoted study results show that in same-gender interactions,
interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-gender interactions,
almost all the interruptions were from males.

• The percentage of male interruptions decreased to 75 per cent in less natural setting, but
there was no doubt that men were still doing most of the interrupting.

• In other contexts, too, it has been found that men interrupt others more than women do.
In departmental meetings and doctor–patient interactions, for instance, the pattern holds.

• Women got interrupted more than men, regardless of whether they were the doctors or
the patients.

• In exchanges between parents and children, fathers did most of the interrupting, and
daughters were interrupted most – both by their mothers and their fathers.

• A study of preschoolers found that some boys start practicing this strategy for dominating
the talk at a very early age. Women are evidently socialized from early childhood to
expect to be interrupted. Consequently, they generally give up the floor with little or no
protest.

Average number of interruptions per interaction:

Interruptions (%)

Same -sex interaction

Speaker 1 43

Speaker 2 57
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Cross-sex interaction

Woman 4

Man 96

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that
women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than men do. In
general research on conversational interaction reveals women as cooperative conversationalists,
whereas men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others. One researcher noted
that women students were also more likely than men to enlarge on and develop the ideas of a
previous speaker rather than challenge them.

Gossip of women: Gossip describes the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between
people in informal contexts. In Western society, gossip is defined as ‘idle talk’ and considered
particularly characteristic of women’s interaction. Its overall function for women is to affirm
solidarity and maintain the social relationships between the women involved. Women’s gossip
focuses predominantly on personal experiences and personal relationships, on personal problems
and feelings. It may include criticism of the behaviour of others, but women tend to avoid
criticizing people directly because this would cause discomfort.

A common male reaction to this behaviour is to label it two-faced, but this is to mistake its
purpose which is often to relieve feelings and reinforce shared values, rather than simply to
communicate referential information. In gossip sessions, women provide a sympathetic response
to any experience recounted, focusing almost exclusively on the affective message what it says
about the speaker’s feelings and relationships rather than its referential content. The male
equivalent of women’s gossip is difficult to identify. In parallel situations, the topics men discuss
tend to focus on things and activities, rather than personal experiences and feelings. Topics like
sport, cars and possessions turn up regularly. The focus is on information and facts rather than on
feelings and reactions.

Can a language be sexist: Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist language. At first
sight, it may seem odd to suggest that a language rather than its speakers is sexist. Sexism
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involves behaviour which maintains social inequalities between women and men. Can a
language contribute to the maintenance of social inequalities between women and men?

There are a number of ways in which it has been suggested that the English language
discriminates against women. Most obviously, perhaps, in the semantic area the English
metaphors available to describe women include an extraordinarily high number of derogatory
images compared to those used to describe men.

Example:

 The chicken metaphor tells the whole story of a girl’s life. In her youth she is a chick,
then she marries and begins feeling cooped up, so she goes to hen parties where she
cackles with her friends. Then she has her brood and begins to hen-peck her husband.
Finally, she turns into an old biddy.
 Animal imagery is one example of an area where the images of women seem
considerably less positive than those for men.
 The negativity of bitch, old biddy and cow, compared to stud and wolf. Animal imagery
which refers to men often has at least some positive component.
 Birds are widely regarded as feather-brained and flighty! Even the more positive chick
and kitten are sweet but helpless pets.

 Women may also be described or referred to in terms of food imagery, which is equally
insulting. Saccharine terms, such as sugar, sweetie, honey, are mainly used for addressing
women.

 Less complimentary terms such as crumpet and tart, however, are restricted to female
referents. They illustrate a common evolutionary pattern in the meaning of words
referring to women.

• Many words reinforce a view of women as a deviant, abnormal or subordinate group. For
example, English morphology – its word-structure – generally takes the male form as the
base form and adds a suffix to signal ‘female’: e.g., lion/lioness, count/countess,
actor/actress; usher/usherette; hero/heroine; aviator/aviatrix.
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• This is true for a number of other European languages, such as French and German, too.
The male form is the unmarked form, and therefore, it is argued, implicitly the norm. The
use of an additional suffix to signal ‘femaleness’ is seen as conveying the message that
women are deviant or abnormal.

• It has also been suggested that suffixes like -ess and - ette trivialize and diminish women,
and, when they refer to occupations such as authoress and poetess, carry connotations of
lack of seriousness.

• This attitude derives from the meaning of the associated diminutive suffixes in terms
such as laundrette (‘a little laundry’) and maisonette.

• ‘Generic’ structures provide further evidence to support the claim that the English
language marginalises women and treats them as abnormal. In fact, words like ‘generic’
he and man can be said to render women invisible.

Example:

Mountain land ecosystems are fragile, and particularly vulnerable to the influence of man and his
introduced animals . . . Life in the mountains is harsh. Storms are common, and temperatures are
low . . . Into this scene comes man, with his great boots, ready to love the mountains to death.
Man loves to hunt. He sees it as a tradition and a right. He believes that deer herds should be
managed so he, and his son after him, can hunt them. He cannot understand his brother’s claim
that deer diminish the range of plants. After all, his brother couldn’t name a single plant that deer
had made extinct.

The use of man as a generic form has a long history. But its generic use is no longer acceptable
to many English speakers because this meaning has become overshadowed by its masculine
meaning. Others avoid it as clumsy or misleading for the same reason: man has become
increasingly ambiguous between the generic and the masculine meaning. In a sentence such as
Man loves to hunt, for instance, readers may be genuinely unsure whether women are meant to
be included or not.

Though generics survive in some outer-circle Englishes, there is evidence that newspapers,
magazines, journals and books in countries such as the USA, Britain and New Zealand are
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increasingly aware of attitudes to the use of (so-called) generic he and man, and writers use a
variety of strategies to avoid these terms. The magazine, The New Zealand Women’s Weekly,
for example, used only a quarter as many of these forms in 1984 as it did in 1964. An American
study of a wide range of magazines and newspapers found a dramatic drop in the use of generic
forms from twelve to four per 5000 words between 1971 and 1979. A study of generics in formal
New Zealand Department of Labour documents revealed a drop from 98 per cent use of generic
he in the 1960s to 7 per cent in the 1990s, with a complementary rise from 0 to 81 per cent for
generic they.

6. Recommendation and Conclusion

Through the analysis above, we know the complicated relationship between gender and
language. After reviewing the former researches into this topic, we can see the differences, and
the similarities between the language of male and female are as important as differences. It is
very helpful for us to know all-round knowledge of gender and language in this field of
sociolinguistics because language is an important communicative tool in human society and it
evolves with the development of the society. Further research should take as many factors as
possible into account and adopt comprehensive research methods, thus we can have an overall
understanding of this social phenomenon language and gender.
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