Kenia Gonzalez
Professor Herb
Psychology of Women 107
September 24, 2014
Sexist in Language Sexism is an important issues that never seems disappear whether its referred toward a male or female. Although its an issue that has had a great improvement through out the years we have not completely solved the problem. Some examples where sexism currently takes place are the fact that there has not been a female president or a males are not taken seriously as daycare owners. Its an issue that may take years to completely exterminate but step by steps can be fixed starting with the non sexist language. A step toward this problem could be in education. Involving students learn what kind of what non sexist language could prevent toward sexism could be the key step toward gender inequality. If schools would prompt nonsexist language at early age, sexism in language as well as gender equality could minimize. Just like we are taught mathematics, english and science we should be taught the correct gender equality language. As students we are constantly reading articles, and textbooks and important factor that should be promoted is nonsexist language. The American Psychology Association (APA) has has made guidelines for nonsexist language in 1977 and since then all APA journals or articles require the writer to have nonsexist language in order for them to be a manuscript. Some of the problems sexist language consist of are: all subjects are male, the search for a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and inherently sexist words (by Jennifer Klein ’93). Some of these problems could be easily fixed by switching the gender to a category, making the subject sentence plural, substituting a noun subject instead of a pronoun, or even talk in first person. Professors could also be a key solution to nonsexist language because there the ones the students are learning from and if there providing the students with nonsexist language the chances the student would use nonsexist language would be higher. A step we could take to solve this problem is teach the professors how to avoid non nonsexist language and as well as prevent it. Schools could start to by providing a mandatory course where professors and faculty members learn about nonsexist language as well as learning the consequences sexist language can cause to a person mental state of being as well as there future in the career field. Health providers should also be given the same course since they are working with patients and need to provide the patients with a welcoming environment. There is no country in the world that has yet to pay the male and the female the same salaries. One could say its because different positions but another could say its might be the boss not giving the employers equal salaries for the same job. This automatically discourage the students, specially the ones being discriminated. So how could one go about this