HS
During week 7’s class discussion about gender and identity, my group members and I talked about sexism in our native languages. My group members had a lot to say about that topic and when it was my turn, I told them: “I don’t know, I don’t think there’s sexism in Chinese language.” After some digging, I have to admit I was wrong.
According to Farris (1988), “Since Chinese, like English but unlike many Indo- European languages, does not have grammatical gender, gender is a covert category in both English and Chinese.” (p.278) Thus, many Chinese umbrella terms, such as child (孩子)， people(人), are used to indicate man by default in many contexts. For example, if you ask an old couple “Do you have grandchildren?”, (你们有孙子sun zi么？) the umbrella term “grandchildren” is more likely to be perceived as asking them specifically about their grandson because 孙子（sun zi）means both grandchild and grandson, whereas 孙女 (sun nv) is used specifically for granddaughter. Moreover, some compound words which are umbrella terms and do not have specific gender marks, also refer to the man by default in daily life, like 伟人（giant），商人（businessman），圣人（sage）,哲人（philosopher）. If a speaker wants to mention a female giant or a businesswoman, then (s)he needs to use these words with the gender marker 女（female）.
However, there are also some compound words with 人（ren） that are frequently used to indicate women, like 媒人（matchmaker）. These words are used to convey strong female stereotype or biased femininity roles. For example, 媒人（matchmaker）is a traditional career normally for women. If it was used with no specific male designator, then the listener would subconsciously cognize this matchmaker as a woman.
In a word, I believe language does not create discrimination, it’s the culture or long-lasting concepts that make language gender-sensitive.
References
Farris, C. S. (1988). Gender and grammar in Chinese: With implications for language universals. Modern China, 14(3), 277-308.
There is an interesting example of this issue in Japanese too! The word 姦しい (kashimashii) means loud/noisy/boisterous, but the kanji is made up of the word 女 (onna — woman) repeated three times. Similarly, one word for “wife” is 家内 (kanai), which literally means “house inside”, so a person who is in the house. Fortunately, I’ve personally been hearing this word less and less recently, since it really is quite sexist.
In English as well, many people are switching to more gender neutral terms, such as “firefighter” rather than “fireman”, or “flight attendant” rather than “stewardess”. However, there’s a lot of push back sometimes. For instance, one line in the Canadian national anthem was recently changed. It was “in all thy sons command”, but has been changed to “in all of us command”. When this change happened, a lot of people were angry because they thought it was an unnecessary alteration to something that wasn’t a problem, and was just an example of “political correctness”. But, actually, the change to the national anthem is merely changing it back to how it used to be! The original phrasing of the anthem (or at least Robert Stanley Weir’s 1908 version of it) was “thou dost in us command”, which was also gender neutral. It’s thought that the anthem’s lyrics were changed to “sons” to drum up patriotism and recruitment for the war effort in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, there is often backlash against efforts to neutralize language, especially when it’s tied to culture, but I hope that Canada, China and Japan can all move forward progressively on this issue.
-Victoria
Funny how this “gender and language” question keeps coming up…I wish it were possible to organize a whole ‘nother course just on this topic. McGill is actually quite unusual among North American universities in NOT having such a course, to the best of my knowledge (I would be very glad to learn that I am wrong!)…Maybe some up-and-coming sociolinguistics scholar could take this on?
Hi, HS. Same as you, I thought there is hardly any gender inequality in Chinese when discussing with my group members in class. I was even a bit happy for that. But later I realized the pronoun “他们”（they）is exactly an example of gender inequality. In Chinese, there are two pronouns to refer to people no less than two — “他们” and “她们”. As you can see from the character, the Chinese character component “亻” in “他们” means people, human, mankind, etc. And the Chinese character component “女” in “她们” means female. As a result, the latter “她们” indicates that the group of people are all female, while the former “他们” can refer to a group of male people or a group of female and male people. But, when there is one man among many women, it is still supposed to use “他们” instead of “她们” to refer to them. In this way, all the women become invisible. Moreover, when reading your post, I realize that there are also other stigmatized characters composing of “女” to insult women. But the same stigma can be found nowhere when it comes to men. Though it is a result of the male superiority idea in history and it has been greatly changed in modern society, it is still a sign of implicit sexism.
Xin