Language and Sexism

How would you complete the following sentence in writing: Each student arrived at Professor Pok's classroom and took out _______ book. 

You might use his or you might use her, but it depends upon the gender of the students in question, right?  Well, we who make up this class know that there are both male and female students present, so what then?  In common speech, we might use their to neutralize the gendered pronoun in our sentence, but in academic writing, the use of a plural pronoun to refer to the singular antecedent each student is considered grammatically incorrect.  In fact, since the 18th century, grammarians have designated the male pronouns (he/him/his) as correct when referring to a singular person of unknown gender.  

From a feminist perspective, this is a profoundly troubling example of how even the very structure of the language we speak and write is used to perpetuate the Patriarchy.  LSA Professor Anne Curzan elaborates on this specific example in the video below:   

We don't have to dig too deep into Modern English to find more examples of sexism in language.  Indeed, the very presence of binary relationships between male and female-gendered nouns creates a hierarchy where the male-gendered words are the "standard," and female-gendered words are the "deviation."  

man/woman

prince/princess

god/godess

hero/heroine

The implication in each of these examples is that men are the norm, while women are merely an afterthought, derived from and dependent on men. As we discuss women as "other" in our society, it is of the utmost importance to also examine the language we use to have these discussions.  According to The Language Guy (a professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University), "Sexist language is language that is inherently sexist in that it is encoded in the language itself and often cannot be avoided."
In many ways, our language informs the way we view the world around us.  Consider the following riddle:

A boy and his father are involved in a terrible car accident.  The father dies, and the boy is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.  The surgeon enters the operating room, and says "I cannot operate on this boy; he is my son."  How is this possible?

If this riddle is familiar to you, you probably know that the answer is: the surgeon is the boy's mother.  This is playing on our preconceptions about the word surgeon; specifically, our default assumption about doctors is that they are male unless otherwise specified.  This is especially insidious, because there is nothing inherent in the words doctor or surgeon that suggest male-ness; we simply associate physicians with men by convention.  The other side of this coin is the similar assumption we make that nurses are female by default.  We even find ourselves specifying male nurse when speaking of the deviation from this norm.

The good news is that our language is always evolving, and knowing the sexist structure exists within Modern English means that we can work to change it.  Indeed, some of the biggest victories of the modern feminist movement have been in the arena of language reform.  The video below gives us a few examples of how we can employ what the instructor calls "gender-inclusive language" in our speech and writing.

Parsing Modern English for examples of sexism may seem tedious, and it may seem like a small concern compared with the bevy of other ways in which women are marginalized in our society, but I think the eradication of gender-bias in our language is one of the most basic processes we must go through if we hope to achieve true gender equality anytime soon.  How can we wage battle against sexism in our society if the language we use in battle perpetuates that very sexism?

Can you think of other examples of gender-bias in our language?  How can we work to neutralize them?