Reducing Sexism in English by David A. Lillie

Abstract: Use of "man, his, him" in English to indicate both genders can be seen as a remnant of sexism in our culture reflected in our language. The correction of this problem has been attempted by various techniques, none of which are felt to be satisfactory. This paper provides the simple solution (perhaps difficult to implement) of adding new, gender neutral pronouns (wom, wem, hes, hir, hirs) to the language to be used specifically for this purpose. The current gender specific words would continue to be used to refer to people of known gender.

By making the term "man" subsume "woman" and arrogate to itself the representation of all of humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of their thought. By taking the half for the whole, they have not only missed the essence of whatever they are describing, but they have distorted it in such a fashion that they cannot see it correctly . . . The androcentric fallacy, which is built into all the mental constructs of Western civilization, cannot be rectified by "adding women." What it demands for rectification is a radical restructuring of thought and analysis which once and for all accepts the fact that humanity consists in equal parts of men and women.

-- Gerda Lerner, The creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), p. 220

For many years I have been frustrated by the built-in sexism in English, the result of having pronouns corresponding to male and female or neuter objects, but none that refer inclusively to male or female. In the past, most likely due to our society's patriarchal structures, the male pronouns "he, his, him" were used for this purpose, and the noun "man" was used to refer to all humans. Our English education is supposed to train us to accept these words as referring to both genders when used in a &#x201Cneutral&#x201D context. A careful study by Janet Shibley Hyde (&#x201CChildren&#x2019s Understanding of Sexist Language,&#x201D Developmental Psychology - Journal of the American Psychology Association, 1984) shows that this often doesn't happen, and that all age groups studied, from 5 years old to 20 years old, and both genders, are much more likely to write stories about male subjects when prompted by sentences using the supposedly gender-neutral male pronouns. Her summary states, &#x201C...it is clear that the tendency for subjects to think of males when they hear "he" in a gender-neutral context (story-telling data) is present from first grade through the college years. ...The contributions of language to sex role development are deserving of considerably more attention, both theoretical and empirically."

After trying a variety of ways around this problem, such as using "he or she," s/he, "himself or herself," etc., or alternating paragraphs with male and female pronouns, I decided that what is needed is to extend the English language. Now that this situation has been recognized, there is no need to continue to write clumsy expressions or confusing gender references. We can simply coin new words that mean what we want, declare their definitions, and begin the process of spreading them around the world until they are commonly used, just like other words which are constantly being added to the language.

The male words would then be properly used only to refer to known male beings.

Considerations in Coining the New Words