Tomatoes Are Girls, Cabbages Are Boys
Why? nobody knows
After I posted about our tendency to gender everything, my sister asked me a great question: Does speaking a more gendered language influence the way we think? I knew exactly what she meant. Hebrew - her first language and mine - is a ‘grammatically gendered’ language in which all nouns have a gender. In Hebrew, a tomato is female, but a cabbage is male. Beds are female, but tables are male. Why? As George Washington once said on SNL, nobody knows. That doesn’t change much about the nature of tables, but does it change the way we view the world?
To answer this question, I dove into the world of linguistics—definitely not my area of expertise—because that’s the kind of devoted sister I am. (If you are a linguist and I’ve made a mistake, let me know in the comments). Here’s what I found: languages fall into three categories based on how much they mark gender. Gendered languages like Hebrew or Spanish fall into one category.1 The second group, ‘natural gender languages’ like English, distinguish between genders through pronouns but only for animate beings, like humans. The third category, gender-neutral languages like Finnish and Turkish, use the same gender-neutral pronouns for all genders.
Linguists still debate how much language shapes thought, but most agree we're neither entirely bound by our language nor completely free of its influence. In a 2009 study, New York high schoolers read Harry Potter excerpts in French, Spanish, or English and then answered a survey on gender attitudes. Those who read in English—the least gendered language—showed the least sexist responses, though the study didn’t track long-term effects. A 2003 study compared how Spanish and German speakers described the word bridge, which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers used words like elegant and slender; Spanish speakers chose strong and towering.2 Another study found that people tend to assign masculine voices to masculine-gendered nouns and feminine voices to feminine ones. So language is not the boss of us, but it certainly shapes how we think.
As an immigrant from Israel to the US, I found the transition to a less gendered language liberating. In Hebrew, every sentence requires a decision about gender. Matching the right gendered adjectives to a pair of socks or a bicycle can be confusing even to native speakers and serves no practical purpose: a sock is a sock by any other gender. Gendering professions is even hairier. Say you go into an Israeli drugstore and ask for a pharmacist you’ve never met; do you use the female or male form? The default in Hebrew uses masculine: Can I see the man-pharmacist? Pharmacists, engineers, computer developers, scientists, reporters, and prime ministers are male by default, while the words for flight attendants, secretaries, nurses, and preschool teachers are default-feminine; can you tell the difference between the two categories? A 2020 study published in the prestigious ‘Nature’ found that languages with more gender-specific occupational terms (waiter/waitress) “tend to have speakers with stronger stereotypical gender associations,” who were more likely to associate the word “man” with “career” and “woman” with “family.”
And if you thought our new-ish emphasis on pronouns in English was complicated, good luck finding a gender-neutral pronoun when even the word “they” is gendered. All sorts of hybrids have been invented to solve the pronoun problem in Hebrew, but all are clunky and unsatisfying, making it harder to incorporate nonbinary genders into daily conversations.
A 2011 study of 111 countries found that those with gendered languages had less gender equality than those with natural-gender or genderless languages. On the other hand, countries with genderless languages included Finland, with the highest gender equality ranking, and Iran with one of the lowest. France and Spain, with their sexist-making Harry Potter excerpts, ranked much closer to Finland than Iran. Language is not destiny.
Regardless of grammar rules, languages are living things subject to norms and politics. Though English does not generally assign genders to nouns, in the 2020 Republican National Convention, Kimberley Guilfoyle called for voters to “stand for an American president who [...] loves this country and will fight for her.” Attorney Brittan Heller noted at the time that referring to the US as ‘she’ used to be common practice but fell out of fashion after women got the vote in 1920. Bringing it back a century later, Heller wrote, was meant to portray the country as weak and vulnerable, a “damsel in distress” in need of a strong man (strongman?) leader. And we know what Trump promised to do to women: protect them, whether they like it or not.
Gendered languages may assign nouns a neutral gender, but each noun will be gendered.
Replications of the study were only partly successful.
Its good to be your sister
Enlightening and enjoyable.