Gendered Language
Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many -- sometimes all -- nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. Drawing on a broad range of historical and linguistic sources, this paper constr...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/405621528167411253/Gendered-language http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29893 |
| Summary: | Languages use different systems for
classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many -- sometimes
all -- nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and
feminine. Drawing on a broad range of historical and
linguistic sources, this paper constructs a measure of the
proportion of each country's population whose native
language is a gender language. At the cross-country level,
this paper documents a robust negative relationship between
the prevalence of gender languages and women's labor
force participation. It also shows that traditional views of
gender roles are more common in countries with more native
speakers of gender languages. In African countries where
indigenous languages vary in terms of their gender
structure, educational attainment and female labor force
participation are lower among those whose native languages
are gender languages. Cross-country and individual-level
differences in labor force participation are large in both
absolute and relative terms (when women are compared to
men), suggesting that the observed patterns are not driven
by development or some unobserved aspect of culture that
affects men and women equally. Following the procedures
proposed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) and Oster
(2017), this paper shows that the observed correlations are
unlikely to be driven by unobservables. Using a permutation
test based on the structure of the language tree and the
distribution of languages across countries, this paper
demonstrates that the results are not driven by spurious
correlations within language families. Gender languages
appear to reduce women's labor force participation and
perpetuate support for unequal treatment of women. |
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