Gender in Language and Gender in Employment

Abstract

Women lag behind men in many domains. Feminist scholars have proposed that sex-based grammatical systems in languages reinforce traditional conceptions of gender roles, which in turn contribute to disadvantaging women. This article evaluates the empirical plausibility of this claim in the context of women's labour market outcomes. Based on a sample of over 100 countries, the analysis shows that places where the majority language is gender-intensive have lower participation of women in the labour force. Individual-level estimates further underscore this finding and indicate a higher prevalence of gender-discriminatory attitudes among speakers of gender-intensive languages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ When the referent of the pronoun is of male biological gender, English prescribes the use of the pronoun ‘he’, while it requires the pronoun ‘she’ when the speaker is talking about someone of female biological gender.

² Languages vary on the grammatical license to drop the pronoun. While English requires including a pronoun in a clause in most cases, Spanish licenses pronoun drop; however, information about the subject can be recovered from the verb (Licht et al., 2007).

³ The results are quantitatively identical when the population is restricted to ages 23–60 instead.

⁴ The countries in the sample are Albania, Andorra, Australia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Former Yugoslav Rep of Macedonia, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Rep of Moldova, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro (and successor Serbia), South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Zambia.

⁵ The data come from Chen (2013) with a small number of missing values filled in based on various linguistic sources.