Gender-Discrimination Still Visible in How We Write

Researchers have recently determined in a new study that the way people write still has some remnants of gender discrimination in it. The names of men are almost always written down before those of women in an enumeration, the scientific paper has revealed. The work was conducted by investigators at the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom, who were led by expert Dr Peter Hegarty. Details will appear online in the March 15 issue of the respected British Journal of Social Psychology, AlphaGalileo reports.

“In the 16th century, naming men before women became the acceptable word-order to use because of the thinking that men were the worthier sex. This grammar has continued with 'Mr and Mrs', 'his and hers' and the names of romantic couples like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. While the original sexist ideas behind this grammar are no longer accepted, we wanted to investigate whether the sexist habit of male names coming before female names still holds true and the psychological reasons why this might be,” the team leader explains.

In the experiments, the researchers collected 10 popular British names for boys and girls, and then 10 popular American names. In total, they had 40 names, 20 for boys and 20 for girls, which they then used in the context of the modern Internet. They introduced them in various combinations inside search engines, such as for example “Sarah and David” versus “David and Sarah.” The researchers used only male-female pairs, and determined that male-first parings were the most popular in the UK (79 percent of all search results), as well as in America (70 percent). The pairings with female-name-first configurations accounted for the rest.

“These results were found to be statistically significant, and support the idea that gender stereotypes still affect the written language. It has been argued that the male-first effect isn't down to sexism but that it is due to phonological attributes of male names, or because male names come more readily to mind as they are popular and familiar. We therefore carried out further studies to investigate whether the male-first finding was a gender stereotyping effect,” Hegarty adds.