Whats So Sexy About Degenderizing Language? Investigating Gender Representations by Readers and Listeners in Norwegian, Finnish and French, 2018

When referring to a person's personal, social or professional role, such as "researcher", "traveler" or "leader", knowing the person's biological gender will not always be crucial to understanding the content of a discourse. Previous research suggests that readers and listeners still make a gender assumption, and often do so in ways that unnecessarily narrow their understanding (mental picture) down to just one gender. In order to avoid gender-differentiated language and thus skew gender representations, Norway has proposed as a linguistic strategy «off-gender by neutralization». This strategy is to use words that do not specify gender when referring to women or men, avoiding e.g. use of feminine suffixes. What remains to be investigated, however, is the effect of removing linguistic allusions to gender on how gender is then interpreted. This project investigates this issue by conducting experimental research in three different languages that encode gender information to different degrees (Finnish, Norwegian and French) and in two modalities of language understanding (reading and listening).