The effect of language on performance: do gendered languages fail women in maths?

Abstract

Research suggests that gendered languages are associated with gender inequality. However, as languages are embedded in cultures, evidence for causal effects are harder to provide. We contribute to this ongoing debate by exploring the relationship between gendered languages and the gender gap in mathematics achievements. We provide evidence for causality by exploiting the prominent (but not exclusive) practice in gendered languages of using masculine generics to address women. In an experiment on a large representative sample of the Hebrew-speaking adult population in Israel, we show that addressing women in the feminine, compared to addressing them in the masculine, reduces the gender gap in mathematics achievements by a third. These effects are stronger among participants who acquired the Hebrew language early in childhood rather than later in life, suggesting that it is the extent of language proficiency that generates one’s sensitivity to being addressed in the masculine or in the feminine. Moreover, when women are addressed in the masculine, their efforts (in terms of time spent on the maths test) decrease and they report feeling that “science is for men” more than when addressed in the feminine. We supplement the analysis with two experiments that explore the roles of general and task-specific stereotypes in generating these effects.

Are Second Person Masculine Generics Easier to Process for Men than for Women? Evidence from Polish

“…This is the first study, as far as we are aware, to provide evidence suggesting that masculine generics in the second person are biased in favour of male addressees during language processing and are not immediately perceived as gender-unspecific. The current findings thus add to the results of Kricheli-Katz and Regev ( 2021 ) who found that the use of Hebrew gender marking that mismatches addressee gender can negatively affect test performance. The results also suggest that the initial processing disadvantage that women experience when addressed with a masculine generic verb may be as strong as the effect of men being addressed through a verb with feminine gender marking.…”

“…As far as we know, the topic of second person masculine generics was only addressed in one study (Kricheli-Katz & Regev, 2021 ) on Hebrew—a language that marks gender on verbs and where the masculine gender can also be used generically. They found that both men and women performed worse on a math test when the questions addressed them using gender marking that mismatched their own gender.…”

Women Anesthesiologists in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Pre-COVID Era: A Multinational Demographic Study

“…Research suggests that gendered languages like French are associated with gender inequality compared with a genderless language such as English. 26 Although we assumed gender equity may be influenced by academic language heritage (French versus English), we did not find any differences in gender equity trends based on language. While our intention was to compare Francophone and Anglophone countries, Nigeria the only Anglophone country in West Africa, demonstrated a gender representation pattern typical of the Francophone countries in West Africa.…”

Stereotype threat, gender and mathematics attainment: A conceptual replication of Stricker & Ward

“…A citation analysis suggests that Danaher and Crandall's interpretation is the more widely accepted: Scopus reports that Danaher and Crandall's [9] reanalysis has received more citations than Stricker and Ward's [10] original report (as of 21st May 2021). Furthermore, in the education literature, Danaher and Crandall's [9] interpretation is often cited without mention of Stricker and Ward [e.g., [14][15][16] and, when both authors are cited, the fact that Stricker and Ward disagreed with Danaher and Crandall is not always highlighted [e.g. , 17].…”

“…In sum, we believe that Stricker and Ward's [7] study merits replication. It is an influential study about a topic of societal importance which is often cited in policy debates and the education literature [e.g., [14][15][16][17]21]; the wider literature has cast a degree of doubt about the reliability of the theoretical mechanism proposed to underly the effect; and the dispute between Stricker and Ward [7,10] and Danaher and Crandall [9] about how to legitimately interpret the study's findings, means that if the observed effect were a false positive, it is unlikely to be due to publication bias or questionable research practices.…”