The interrelation of language and the gender hierarchy has also been documented in a study which analyzed the ratio of male to female pronouns (e.g., he/she, his/hers) in written texts (full texts of about 1.2 million U.S. A large-scale content analysis of 800,000 Reuters news messages (published in English between 19) found that the pronoun he was more frequent than she in the news and also appeared in more positive contexts ( Gustafsson Sendén et al., 2014). That masculine forms are used to represent all human beings is in accord with the traditional gender hierarchy, which grants men more power and higher social status than women ( Ridgeway and Correll, 2004). Feminine forms, on the other hand, do not function generically but refer to women only ( Hellinger and Bußmann, 2001). Thus, masculine forms not only designate men but also mixed-gender groups or referents whose gender is unknown or unspecified (see Stahlberg et al., 2007). In English, for example, generic he can be used when gender is irrelevant (e.g., the user… he) and in German, masculine role nouns serve as labels for mixed gender groups (e.g., einige Lehrer, ‘several teachers’ for a group of male and female teachers). An almost universal and fundamental asymmetry lies in the use of masculine generics. Linguistic gender asymmetries are ubiquitous, as documented in the contributions in Hellinger and Bußmann (2001, 2002, 2003), which analyze 30 languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, English, Finnish, Hindi, Turkish, Swahili) from various language families.

Words that start with stereo