Grammar girl here, I'm in Yann Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide

to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we're going to talk about languages that have more gender than English and about

differences between simple and simplistic and backward and backwards.

When you hear a sentence like, a soldier must be able to count on her fellow soldiers,

what strikes you most?

Some of you might think the pronoun feels off since it doesn't follow the old English

rule of using the generic he when gender is unspecified.

But studies have shown the primary reason the sentence strikes you as odd is probably

more about the clash between the underlying gendered concept of who we expect soldiers

to be, men, and the gender of the pronoun, she.

For example, research shows that when people come across something like a mismatch between

a pronoun and a stereotypically gendered role like that of a nurse or soldier, their

brains can actually have a little more trouble processing speech or text compared to how easily

they can do it when the pronouns do match gender expectations.

So it's not surprising there's been a lot of attention over the past few years on making

language and our gendered views about social roles less biased.

And we may hear about problems or objections in English, but it's even more interesting

to think about how people are trying to meet the even greater challenges in languages

that have grammatical gender like French or Hebrew where it's impossible to have a sentence

without pervasive gender marking and where change can feel like an attack on cultural

...