We have Pascal M. Gygax, University of Fribourg, visiting this week and giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium (title and abstract follow).

Why mechanics are always thought of as men: When language creeps into the way we perceive gender

When referring to a person’s personal, social or professional role as scientists, travellers or managers, knowing the person’s biological sex is not always crucial for comprehending the discourse. In fact, it rarely is.  Research nevertheless suggests that readers of sentences where gender is not specified such as “Travellers to Basel are requested to change trains in Olten” still elaborate a mental representation of travellers to include gender. In the presentation, I will present data across different languages to show that readers tend to attribute gender to text protagonists when referred to by role nouns and that they often do so in ways that unnecessarily narrow their mental representation. I will argue that in grammatical languages where the masculine form is assigned a generic meaning – on top of its specific one – readers and listeners attribute gender to the relative disadvantage of women. Under the heading of “sexist language” this issue has been a topic of political debate since the 1970s, especially in those languages that have grammatical gender, such as German or French.