Gender Roles in Language
Examine the language in relation to gender, and observe its changing role in society."A businessman is aggressive; a businesswoman is pushy. A businessman is good on details; she is picky.... He follows through; she doesn't know when to quit. He stands firm; she is hard.... His judgements are her prejudices. He is a man of the world; she's been around. He isn't afraid to say what is on his mind; she is mouthy. He excersises authority diligently; she's power mad. He's closemouthed; she's secretive. He climbed the ladder of success; she slept her way to the top."From "How to Tell a Businessman from a Businesswoman," Graduate School of management UCLA.From the first moment a child begins to understand the spoken word, they begin to receive messages about society view of the different sexes.Language itself can not be deemed good or bad, but it does reflect individual or societal values. The above example displays the way in which language can be used to stereotype gender. Both sexes in the example are behaving in the same way but the language used has separated them, praising the male whilst disparaging the female. In order to explore the differences between males and females regarding language we must look at whether or not
The second reason he gives is that men in our society are rated by their occupation, earnings, and their own abilities, in other words what they 'do'. These both give a positive impression of male, carrying connotations of sexual prowess or wiliness. In fact, women who use 'Miss' or 'Mrs' are perceived as having lower instrumental traits such as leadership and competence, but stronger in expressive traits and are apparently more likeable than those who use 'Ms. Danish 'raedsimt morosom' (awfully funny)'. It is claimed that we can speak of 'unwed mothers' but not 'unwed fathers', of a 'career woman' but not a 'career man' as there has arguably been no stigma for a bachelor to father a child, and men are supposed to have careers. Talbot does conceed, however, that there are differences in the pronunciation patterns of men and women. The newspapers ridiculed this action, showing their ffeelings through headlines such as "Gingerbread person takes the biscuit. Their are some titles which have mutated even further: first there was 'chairman', this changed to 'chairperson' and now one must say 'he/she is 'the Chair'. However, in relation to civility and fairness, Cameron argues that 'senior people' in jobs were unwittingly offending their females colleges by using non inclusive phraseslike 'the best man for the job'. In additionthe coloured people just happen to be the oppressed group. The guidelines I mentioned earlier made much of a point of this as they claimed that sexist language could lead to alienation of female students, and so non sexist language was designed to include all the potential addresses. Then one must consider animal imagery of a male; wolf, stud. As on the other hand, females have 'cleaning lady' and 'tea lady', to which feminists have objected.
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Acceptance Essays
