Geekery IV: We are missing pronouns.

Have you ever struggled with calling a beloved animal or a human baby "it", even though you don't know the gender to provide a "he" or "she"? Do you often use "they" in situations where an English teacher (or I) would be likely to correct you to "he or she"? This may seem trivial; your friends will undoubtedly still catch your meaning if you say, "If someone slacks off on a group project, they should get the low grade." But there is significant evidence to suggest that gender in language may affect the way we think and relate to cultural concepts of gender. In many situations, we literally don't have the words to speak about people without giving their genders.

In a 1978 experiment, Moulton, Robinson, and Elias tested college students to see if they were influenced by the gender of pronouns: 'College students were asked to make up a story about a fictional character who fit the following theme: 'In a large coeducational institution, the average student will feel isolated in introductory courses.' 1/3 of the students received the pronoun "his" in the blank, 1/3 "his or her", and 1/3 "their". ("Their" is of course technically incorrect, and "his" was considered grammatically correct until recent decades.)

The results? Predictably, there was a strong tendency for female students to write about females and male students to write about males. As a whole, however, only 35% of the "his" students wrote about females, compared to 46% for "they" and 56% for "his or her". Clearly, the gender of the pronoun influenced the writers. This experiment has been repeated and expanded to include different age ranges and different activities and yielded similar, and sometimes even more pronounced, results. [1]

As English speakers, most of our nouns are common gender. For example, if you use the word "sheep," that sheep could be male or female, or you might later refer to it as an "it". Likewise, the word "firefighter" does not refer specifically to a man or a woman (although our gender-typing minds would probably think of a man first).

However, our pronouns aren't so incorporating. We have "he" (masculine), "she" (feminine), and "it" (neuter), but no corresponding word that doesn't denote gender. "You", "they", and "we" do not, but the first two cannot serve the first person, and "we" and "they" cannot be singular. Therefore, we pretend babies and animals are sexless, and we fill our writing with awkward "he or she" phrases, or else ignore these fixes and become barbarians and sexists.


1. Check out Janet Shibley Hyde, 1984. Third graders are more likely to say that the sentence, "When a kid plays football, she likes to play with friends," than the same sentence with a he in it, even though both are grammatically correct.