[Ads-l] Berkeley and gender neutral words

[Laurence Horn]

If memory serves, it (or a similar one) was conducted by Schneider & Hacker.  It’s discussed in detail in Casey Miller & Kate Swift’s _Words and Women_ (1977/1991).  Although that study (I don’t have it on me) was to illustrate chapters of a putative history book (“Early Man” vs. “Early Humans”, “Renaissance Man” vs. “Renaissance Life”, etc.)—not only were there fewer women in the “Man” chapter illustrations but fewer children.  

LH

> On Jul 20, 2019, at 8:31 PM, Alice Faber <afaber at PANIX.COM> wrote:
> 
> 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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org