Don't Touch My Projectile: Gender Bias and Stereotyping in Syntactic Examples

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language. This article presents the results of two studies which show that gender bias and stereotyping are widespread in the example sentences of syntax textbooks. Results from both studies indicate that little has changed over the past twenty-five years: virtually all of the authors favor malegendered NPs as subjects and agents and regularly stereotype both genders. Throughout the paper we make reference to the LSA guidelines for nonsexist usage, pointing out the need for such guidelines, and highlighting the gaps in the current version.* INTRODUCTION. It is a familiar and long-standing tradition to use the names John and Mary in syntactic examples. Over the last two decades, however, some syntacticians have switched to gender-neutral names such as Pat, Kim, Chris, and Sandy to avoid both the stereotypical gender roles which John and Mary virtually always play, as well as the common imbalance between use of female and male names. One might therefore assume that inequality in example sentences is no longer an issue-that linguists have largely eliminated gender bias and stereotyping from their examples. In this article we demonstrate that, unfortunately, this is not the case.We present here the results of two studies that support this claim. First, we review the results of our case study of the example sentences in one recent syntax textbook (Macaulay & Brice 1994). In that study we considered such factors as the frequency of female-vs. male-gendered subjects, objects, and indirect objects; the thematic roles played by female-and male-gendered NPs; and the kinds of states, activities, and attributes predicated of female and male participants in the sentences. Second, we present the results of a survey of gender distribution and stereotyping in example sentences from ten other syntax textbooks, published between 1969 and 1994. Results from both studies indicate that little has changed over the past twenty-five years: all but two of the authors favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype males and females.1 Problems like these were officially recognized in the scholarly writings of linguistics when, in 1992, the LSA adopted guidelines for nonsexist usage. These guidelines explic-* We are grateful to the editors of Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and , and the several different audiences to whom we have read versions of this work for their many suggestions. M. Macaulay would like to thank Edie Thornton for teaching the women's studies class that she sat in on; many of the ideas in this paper were influenced by things she lea...

The Application of Functional Linguistics in Exposing Gender Bias in Iranian High School English Textbooks

“…The findings of the present study are entirely consistent with previous studies (Macaulay & Brice, 1997;Lesikin, 2001). Lesikin relates this thematic structure to communicative structures.…”

How Much Gender Is Too Much Gender?

“…Consider Iceland, where most individuals can only have a patronym 54 For a recent overview of the literature on gendered language and stereotypes, see Menegatti and Rubini (2017). See also Macaulay and Brice (1997). 55 See Silveira (1980) and Hamilton (1991) on the widespread practice of using gender-neutral terms for men (e.g., doctor) and gender-specific terms for similarly situated women (e.g., 'woman', 'lady doctor').…”

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“…Studies on gender bias in student evaluations for instructors (Eidinger, 2017;MacNell et al, 2015;Boring et al, 2016;Centra and Gaubatz, 2000), and recommendation letters (Trix and Psenka, 2003;Schmader et al, 2007) also show similar disparities in terms of harshness of evaluations, length of letters, descriptive words, and use of standout adjectives. Bias in language has also been studied for textbooks (Otlowski, 2003;Gharbavi and Mousavi, 2012;Macaulay and Brice, 1997), Wikipedia edits (Recasens et al, 2013), political text (Yano et al, 2010), media content (Ali et al, 2010;Len-Ríos et al, 2005;Smith, 1997), sports journalism (Eastman and Billings, 2000;Tyler Eastman, 2001;Kinnick, 1998;Fu et al, 2016) and in movie character portrayals (Ramakrishna et al, 2017;Sap et al, 2017). These approaches are domain-specific and rely on techniques like counting gender occurrences, manually annotating words or mentions, constructing list of keywords and lexicons, carrying out surveys, etc.…”