Inclusive language: A storm in a tea cup or an answer to a real problem?
When referring to a person’s personal, social or professional role as scientists, travellers or managers, knowing the person’s sex is not always crucial for comprehending the discourse. In fact, it rarely is. Research nevertheless suggests that when reading or listening to sentences where gender is not specified, such as “The professors were really interested” or “Les professeurs étaient vraiment intéressés”, we still form a mental representation of these people that includes gender. In the presentation, I will present data across different languages (e.g., French and German) to show that we tend to attribute gender in ways that unnecessarily narrow our perceptions of the world. I will specifically argue that language inevitably compel us to attend certain properties of the world that are not always relevant. I will further explore certain properties of grammatical languages (e.g., using the masculine form as the default value), and discuss whether these properties do or do not bias the way we attribute gender. I will also briefly explore some practicalities of the issues at stake, of what is often referred to as “inclusive language”.
Short biography
Pascal Gygax is head of the Psycholinguistics and Applied Social Psychology team at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). His work focuses on the way our brain processes the male grammatical mark, and how language creeps into our perception of gender. Together with his colleagues Sandrine Zufferey and Ute Gabriel, he has just published a public-understanding-of-science book with the Éditions Le Robert, entitled "Le cerveau pense-t-il au masculin? Cerveau, langage et représentations sexistes" [Does the brain think in the masculine? Brain, language and sexists representations].