“No se preocupe la señora marquesa” : A study of gender bias in example sentences in the RAE grammar textbook
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Abstract
On March 4th 2012, El País, a major newspaper from Spain, published a report on language and sexism issued by RAE (Real Academia Española – Royal Academy of the Spanish language) titled “Sexismo lingüístico y visibilidad de la mujer” (“Linguistic sexism and women’s visibility”) (Bosque, 2012). This report was written by Ignacio Bosque, a member of the Academy, and endorsed by 26 other members. The report analyzes nine guidelines for non-sexist language use published in the last five years in Spain by universities, state and county governments, and labor unions. According to this report, there is no need for guidelines for non-sexist language use, as gender marking in Spanish is not sexist, but only grammatical. Nevertheless, gender marking is not the only location for a gender bias. Previous research by Macaulay & Brice (1997) analyzes constructed examples in syntax textbooks and shows that examples in the textbooks are biased towards male-gendered NPs and are highly stereotyped. The results of their study demonstrate that the types of NPs, their syntactic function and thematic role, also play a role in sexist language use. Building on the findings by Macaulay and Brice, this study examines gender bias in the examples of grammar textbook produced by the RAE in an effort to ascertain the need for non-sexist language use guidelines.
The results demonstrate that the RAE textbook shows a gender bias in favor of males. Male participants outnumber female participants. For any activities and states a woman is involved in, a man will be involved in two or threefold. The results also show that in the domain of employment and occupation, women have a subordinated place. Any female social status is inherited, as most females are part of the royalty, which means that women do not gain status through their own efforts. Additionally, males are more associated with intellectual activities, as they appear with predicates such as saber ‘to know’, pensar ‘to think’, darse cuenta ‘to realize’, razonar ‘to reason’, and conocer ‘to know’. Moreover, the analysis reveals that male writers contribute with triple amount of example tokens in the corpus under analysis. Thus, Macaulay & Brice’s (1997: 815) statement that “females are simply not significant actors in the world constructed in most corpora of example sentences” holds true for this particular textbook as well. Thus, it appears that non-sexist language guidelines would aid in how men and women are represented in published language materials.
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