Gender-neutralisation and Gender-specification in the Workplace: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

[eng] Feminist language activists were highly interested in examining language in order to discern sexist usages and change them. These include the use of generic he, the marking of female forms with suffixes such as -ess and -ette, and gender-stereotyping among others. In order to reform language and achieve gender equality, gender-neutralization and gender-specification were proposed. The aim of this paper is to analyse to which extent these two strategies have contributed to make language less sexist in American English. For this purpose, six occupational labels grouped into three sets have been selected and a sample of 500 tokens for each of them has been collected from COCA and entered in a database. Each set has been analysed according to frequency per period, frequency per text-type and gender frequency per period. This way it has been possible to discern the differences in the use of each term.