[Ads-l] Berkeley and gender neutral words

[Alice Faber]

On 7/20/19 4:13 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> Is there any pre-craze empirical evidence that women in general found such
> words demeaning, offensive, sexist, or the like?

Actually, there is. I don't remember the citation, but back when I 
taught intro linguistics and psycholinguistics, there was a study we 
discussed where the experimental task was to find pictures in magazines 
to illustrate specific words. When participants were finding pictures of 
firefighters, mail carriers, flaggers and the like they were more likely 
to select pictures of women than when they were finding pictures of 
firemen, mailmen, flagmen, etc. These participants may well have claimed 
not to think of the latter as inherently gendered terms, but they 
certainly acted as if they were.

AF

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