Common gender Masculine gender Feminine gender
waiter waiter waitress
hero hero heroine
pilot pilot woman pilot
doctor doctor woman doctor
surgeon surgeon female surgeon
lawyer lawyer lady lawyer
Interestingly, when we hear other people say “ My cousin is a lawyer.”, most people always conclude that my cousin is a male. Most of the time, whenever we refer to a woman, we have to elaborately add woman, female or lady before many professionals.
But other professionals like secretary, nurse, typist, receptionist, dressmaker, are often used to indicate females. When they are used to refer to males, you should add male or man before them, such as: male nurse, male typist, and male secretary. It makes clear that men monopolize the high status professionals. Women can only do service work or low social status work.
English is a kind of super masculine language. This can be easily seen in compound words formed by word plus man structure, such as chairman, businessman, congressman, newsman, statesman, salesman, mailman, policeman, and spokesman. From these words, we can easily know that males are the center of the society. These jobs are certainly taken by males and women are completely excluded.
In addition, there are some female professionals formed by adding the bound morpheme such as –ess, -ine to the root. For example:
Male Female
poet poetess
prince princess
god goddess
count countess
hero heroine
This kind of word-formation seems to tell that women are derived from men and attached to men. These discriminatory practices often make women invisible and treat them secondary. 3.1.5 Word order
Sexism in language is also reflected in word order. When men and women are presented together, usually words denoting male sex are put in front of female sex. Making females come second reflects the sexist attitude that men are superior to women. It is not hard to find male-female word order pairs in English literature, newspaper, magazines as well as in speech, such as male and female, husband and wife, father and mother, boys and girls, his and hers, son and daughter, brother and sister, host and hostess, king and queen, Adam and Eve and so on. No matter in books or on radio, even in daily dialogue, we can often read and hear such words:
(1) Good morning, boys and girls!
(2) They would have allowed males and females to go to school together.
Such a language phenomenon seems to appear so unquestionably natural as to be widely accepted as a language norm.
However, there are also cases in which male-female order is reversed, for example bride and groom, and ladies and gentlemen. The former shows that marriage is important to women and the latter is influenced by the notion that men should protect women. Putting ladies before gentlemen doesn’t show that women are more superior to men or ladies first, but indicates that in men’s mind, women, the same as children, are the weaker ones.[10] 3.2 Semantic derogation of women
Language has a tendency to neglect women, treat women as submission and also demean women.[11] The process of words that refer to women acquiring demeaning or sexual connotations has been widely observed, and has been called semantic derogation. 1 ，法语论文 |
