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Pronouns & plosive sounds - can you change society with a single word?

Argument

Our brains can learn to divide a perceptual continuum at an arbitrary point, so that the two sides seem like distinct categories.

What if I told you there's a relationship between backpacks and binary gender pronouns? But not in an obvious way.

The words 'back' and 'pack' sound pretty distinct to an English speaker. Yet those plosive 'b' and 'p' sounds are formed in a similar way - the main difference is the 'voice onset time', that is the interval between release of breath and vocal cord movement.

If the VOT is less than 30ms, you hear a 'b', and above that a 'p'. Our brains have placed a fence at an arbitrary point on that continuum, parting it like the Red Sea so that the two sides seem like separate categories. This helps us quickly distinguish English words.

But other languages don't always distinguish these sounds in the same way, so babies have to learn this distinction differently depending on where they grow up. And the downside of learning to amplify the difference between these VOT perceptual categories is that we lose the ability to hear small differences within a category - in other words, while our brains amplify the difference between 29 vs 31ms, we throw away information about 31 vs 33ms.

What does this have to do with gender?

Our language's grammar rules have a subtle influence on the way we think.

Imagine you’re asked to describe a bridge. Is it slender and elegant, or sturdy and strong? Your answer might subtly depend on the language you speak.

Lera Boroditsky's research showed that people describe objects differently based on the gender of the noun - for example, the word for 'bridge' is feminine in German (die Brücke), but masculine in Spanish (el puente). German speakers are more likely to describe bridges as "beautiful" or "fragile," while Spanish speakers opt for descriptors like "strong" or "long." It's not that bridges inherently possess these traits, but rather that the gendered structure of the language shapes how people think about them.

Or consider the Guugu Yimithirr people in Australia - the cardinal directions (north, south, etc) are a ore part of their language, and as a result speakers develop an "internal compass" from a very young age.

Language shapes thought in subtle ways.

Even in English, where nouns don't have genders, we still need to track the gender of every person in a conversation so that we can use the correct pronoun (he vs she). And indeed, we also distinguish between male and female in many nouns (prince vs princess), and even occasionally in adjectives (blond vs blonde).

In a sense, just like we draw perceptual categories for sound, our language draws boundaries between concepts like gender. And just as these distinctions help us navigate the world quickly, they also limit how fluidly we can perceive it.

Given this, we can make some predictions:

1. When a language emphasises the distinction between genders, we will see a larger gender gap in society.

If your language commonly distinguishes between male and female, that will subtly reinforce gender distinctions in your mind.

We might predict that this will manifest at a larger scale in various ways. Concretely:

There are apparently a few languages that don't have gendered pronouns (e.g. Finnish, Bengali, Persian), so there may be enough variability to test the hypothesis.

2. If we de-emphasise the distinction between male and female in our language (e.g. by adopting a single pronoun for everyone as the default), we would notice the distinction slightly less in general, and find it easier to think of gender as non-binary.

To my knowledge, no one has attempted this experiment at a large scale. Swedish has adopted hen as a gender-neutral pronoun for non-binary people, but that's not the same thing as using the same pronoun for everyone.

Even if the hypothesis were true, we'd expect this to be a fairly small effect, and to take many years to be visible.

Won't this confuse everyone? Perhaps slightly - it might be slightly harder to tell whether a pronoun is referring to this person or that one. If we were to use they as a gender-neutral replacement for he/she, we would also lose information about singular vs plural. But in practice, we manage just fine with the gender- and plurality-neutral 2nd-person you in English. Context is usually enough.

What is my takeaway?

The long arc of history and morality seem to lean towards self-determination, as long as others aren't harmed. After all, this is just a special case of the Golden Rule - do as you would be done by. The Golden Rule is rarely the final word, but it's often a good place to start. So as a policy, I try not to tell people what they should want or be or say.

I want to live in a more equitable society, that doesn't discriminate based on gender (for starters). There's evidence that arbitrary perceptual boundaries become more separated in our minds. And there's evidence that the rules of language shape our thought subtly. So perhaps we should change our language so that we don't have to practice noticing male vs female in every sentence. The smallest, most impactful step would be to adopt a single pronoun for everyone (e.g. they).

It tickles me to think that such a small effect could have a noticeable macroscopic effect in time. This is a minor, seditious, evidence-based act of progressiveness that we can all take unilaterally, even if it feels a little awkward at times. So this is why I am attempting to use they/their in place of he/she and his/her wherever I can.




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