Eine interessante Studie zu Gendersternen und anderen Zeichen für „gendergerechte Sprache“:
In gender-marked languages, masculine and feminine grammatical forms are distinct, with the masculine form also used for gender-mixed groups (generic masculine). Previous research indicates that the generic masculine elicits male-biased representations. Psychologically, this may be due to a misunderstanding of the communicative intention, an automatic activation of male associations, or both. In two preregistered experiments, we tested whether the male bias is affected by emphasizing the generic intention. Adding contextual information that conveyed a group’s gender-mixed composition eliminated the male bias (Study 1). However, the male bias remained robust when continuously reminding participants of the generic intention via a novel grammatical marker (Study 2). These results suggest that the male bias is partly driven by associative processes that are immune against a purely explicit disambiguation of the generic intention.
Quelle: Reminding May Not Be Enough: Overcoming the Male Dominance of the Generic Masculine
Es wurden also in der ersten Studie Sätze gebildet, die deutlich machten, dass dort zwei Geschlechter waren, auch wenn das generische Maskulinum verwendet worden ist („Die Nachrichtensprecher trugen schicke Anzüge und Kleider“). Dann wurden andere Sätze nachgestellt und geschaut ob diese als Zusammenpassend angesehen wurden, etwa „Zur Vorbereitung lasen sich alle Frauen/Männer die Nachrichten durch“ (wobei ich es so verstanden habe, dass dann da nur Männer Oder Frauen stand.
Aus der Beschreibung der ersten Studie:
Importantly, these groups were pretested in previous studies to be neither stereotypically male- nor female-dominated (Gygax et al., 2008; Kennison & Trofe, 2003; as cited in Körner et al., 2022). For each social group, two versions of a first sentence were formulated. One version suggested that the group consisted of both women and men (stereotypically or factually), thereby providing a context which disambiguated the generic intention of the masculine grammar form. Specifically, disambiguation was implemented in one of four ways: (a) gender-stereotypic clothing (e.g., Die Nachrichtensprecher trugen schicke Anzüge und Kleider. [The newscasters wore fancy suits and dresses.]), (b) existence of romantic couples in the group (e.g., Einige der Musiker flirteten miteinander. [Some of the musicians flirted with each other.]), (c) gender-dependent nomination rules (e.g., Die Athleten traten in geschlechtergetrennten Klassen an. [The athletes competed in gender-segregated classes.]), or (d) direct mentioning of gender proportion whereby women and men were used equally often across stimuli (e.g., 70% der Kinderärzte waren männlich. [70% of the pediatricians were male.]). Each version was implemented in eight sentence continuations. The other version of each first sentence did not contain any gender-related information but was otherwise formulated in resemblance to the respective disambiguated version (e.g., Die Nachrichtensprecher trugen schicke Kleidung. [The newscasters wore fancy clothes.] instead of Die Nachrichtensprecher trugen schicke Anzüge und Kleider. [The newscasters wore fancy suits and dresses.]). For each of the 32 first sentences of the target pairs, a semantically coherent continuation was formulated, describing a gender subset of the first group (e.g., Zur Vorbereitung lasen sich alle Frauen/Männer die Nachrichten durch. [In preparation, all women/men read through the news.]). Similar to previous studies employing this paradigm (Gygax et al., 2008; Körner et al., 2022), the continuations varied in how exactly the subset was expressed (e.g., manche [some], die meisten [most], alle [all] women/men). For each participant, the 32 target pairs were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions (gender continuation: women vs. men, contextual disambiguation: yes vs. no), resulting in eight target pairs in each condition. The filler pairs were directly adopted from Körner et al. (2022). All 32 filler pairs were formulated in only one version. The second sentence was always semantically incoherent with the first sentence, for example, because the mood or occupation of the described persons did not match. The filler pairs were only included to balance the number of yes/no responses and were irrelevant for analyses.
Die Ergebnisse:
„Context Disambiguation“ bedeutet, es war die Version, wo beide Geschlechter angedeutet waren, wie man sieht ist die Übereinstimmungsrate bei diesen Fällen höher, es wird also eher verstanden, dass das generische Maskulinum Frauen und Männer umfassen kann, bei der Version wo das nicht der Fall war ist ein relativ geringer Unterschied zu Lasten der Frauen vorhanden.
Die zweite Studie sah so aus:
The sentence pairs were adopted from Study 1. Specifically, the filler pairs were identical to the ones used in Study 1, and the target pairs were identical to the ones used in the nondisambiguated context condition in Study 1 (e.g., Die Nachrichtensprecher trugen schicke Kleidung. [The newscasters wore fancy clothes.]). To implement the factor generic intention reminder, a modification of each sentence pair (target and filler) was generated. In this version, a circumflex character (“^”) was added after each generically intended masculine group description (e.g., Die Nachrichtensprecher^ trugen schicke Kleidung. [The newscasters^ wore fancy clothes.]). This served as a reminder of the generic intention (see Procedure). Depending on the between-subjects factor generic intention reminder, one of both versions was chosen for all sentence pairs presented to a participant. For each participant, the 32 target pairs were randomly divided in 16 sentences having a female gender continuation and 16 sentences having a male gender continuation.
Procedure
The procedure was identical to the procedure of Study 1. Again, the 64 sentence pairs chosen in accordance with the structure described above were presented in randomized order.
Deviating from Study 1, another slide was included after the initial task instruction, informing the participants about the employed grammatical gender form.
In the reminder condition, this information was: “The groups are often gender-mixed. In such cases, we use a variation of the generic masculine that is followed by a circumflex character to indicate that men and women are included in the group (e.g., ‘the participants^’).”
In the no-reminder condition, this information was: “The groups are often gender-mixed. In such cases, we use the generic masculine. This refers to both male and female group members.”
Es wurde also ein neues Zeichen ^ eingeführt, quasi als Genderstern, aber eben anscheinend nur „Die Nachrichtensprecher^“ und nicht „Die Nachrichtensprecher^innen“.
Zudem wurde bei der „Ungegenderten Form“ ein Hinweis erteilt, dass das generische Maskulinum Männer und Frauen meint und in der „Gegenderten Form“ das das Zeichen ^ verwendet wird, um deutlich zu machen, dass Männer und Frauen gemeint sind.
Die Ergebnisse:
Aus den Ergebnissen:
The mixed-model analysis was followed-up with pairwise contrast tests to examine potential differences between gender continuations (women vs. men) separated by reminder conditions. Indicating an overall male bias, the proportion of “yes” responses was higher when the second sentence described men as compared to women, which was evident in a significant effect of gender continuation. There was no interaction between gender continuation and generic intention reminder. Contrast tests (two-tailed) revealed that the male bias occurred when the generic intention reminder was absent, z = 5.87, p < .001, and similarly, when the reminder was present, z = 3.60, p < .001.
In der „No generic intention Reminder“ Version gab es also nur den Hinweis vorne weg, in der Yes Version war der ^ da. Der ^ machte allerdings keinen großen Unterschied.
Auf Twitter wurde und auch wohl in diesem Artikel der Welt wurde angeführt, dass das Genderzeichen damit nutzlos ist. Ohne einen weiteren Zusatz wie bei „Nachrichtensprecher*innen“ hat es keinen großen Effekt. (bei Nachrichtensprecher*innen wird allerdings ein Effekt zu einem Bias zugunsten von Frauen festgestellt in anderen Studien).
Befürworter würden vielleicht anführen, dass mit dem Zusatzzeichen ja Inklusivität hergestellt wird für „nichtbinäre Formen“. Allerdings werden die in den Studien eigentlich nie geprüft.
Aus der Studie:
Our studies extend previous findings demonstrating the robustness of the male bias to an explicit communication of the generic meaning (Gygax et al., 2012; Körner et al., 2022). We argue that the present manipulations go beyond the ones used in previous studies for two reasons. First, our manipulations ensured that the generic intention was emphasized within each sentence in which a GM was presented. This suggests the male biases found in previous studies were not only due to the participants forgetting the previously instructed generic intention. Given these rigorous conditions, the results of Study 2 provide strong evidence against the assumption that gender representations are entirely determined by the communicated meaning of the masculine grammar form. Second, our manipulations introduce the relevant distinction between meaning cues that can activate gender-relevant associations on their own (i.e., contextual cues in Study 1) and meaning cues that cannot (i.e., the grammatical marker in Study 2). Our results suggest that only the former can succeed in overcoming the male bias. More broadly, this is in line with research indicating that unwanted associative activation (e.g., automatic stereotyping) can be tackled by counter-activation, but not by inhibition attempts (Gawronski et al., 2008; see also Deutsch et al., 2006; Strack & Deutsch, 2004). Of course, in the domain of gendered language, more research is needed to test the interplay of explicit meaning cues and their associative implications. For example, explicit information and associative activation might be manipulated orthogonally to test which affects gender representation more (and does so under which conditions).
An interesting parallel can be drawn between the present Study 2 and the study by Körner et al. (2022). These authors compared gender representations elicited by the GM with those elicited by the gender-star form, which is considered the predominant gender-inclusive alternative to the GM in German. It corresponds to the feminine form, where an asterisk conveys the inclusive intention by separating the word stem from the female suffix (e.g., die Lehrer*innen). While we found that merely reminding readers of the GM’s intended inclusivity did not eliminate a male bias, Körner et al. (2022) observed a female bias for the gender-star form such that sentence continuations describing women as compared to men were accepted faster and more often than those describing men. Thus, both studies suggest a dominance of the semantic priming (male or female) that is difficult to overcome by mere flagging (“^” or “*”) to remind recipients of the intended generic meaning. However, it should be noted that in the Körner et al. (2022) study, the female bias elicited by the gender star form was somewhat weaker than the male bias elicited by the GM and was not replicated in a different experimental paradigm (Zacharski & Ferstl, 2023). In a recent linguistic analysis, the gender-star form’s suffix has even been suggested to operate as an independent semantic prime (Völkening, 2022). In any case, more research is needed to better understand the operation of associative and propositional mechanisms when processing gender-inclusive forms.
Finally, we believe that our results are informative for the societal debate on the (lack of) gender-fairness of the GM. Defendants of the GM against feminist critics argue that the GM is unproblematic because the generic intention is supposedly conveyed well by the conversational context in real-life communication. Similarly, psycholinguistic paradigms in general have been criticized for lacking a realistic communicative context that conveys the generic meaning of masculine grammar forms (e.g., Eisenberg, 2022). Our research partly confirms these concerns, as a disambiguating context eliminated the male bias elicited by nonstereotyped group nouns in Study 1. However, this is limited to situations in which the conversational context provides additional gender-balanced elements. Study 2 indicates that male-biased gender representations are to be expected when no additional male and female semantics are activated, despite the generic meaning being similarly clear. Note that explicit communication is a commonly used attempt in real-life scenarios to make the GM more gender fair. For instance, German articles sometimes include a justifying note in the beginning, explaining how the GM will be used throughout the text to refer to persons of all genders. While these efforts might help in communicating the author’s intentions, we conclude that they do not necessarily balance the reader’s gender representations. Taken together, the present results suggest that the mere knowledge about the generic meaning does not suffice in resolving asymmetrical gender representations, neither in psycholinguistic experiments nor in real-life communication.
Demnach stellt die Studie darauf ab, dass die gramatikalische Form schon einen Bias erzeugen kann, die eben dem Sprachgebrauch folgt, also „Nachrichtensprecher“ ob mit oder ohne Zusatz eher einen (leichten) männlichen Bias und „Nachrichtensprecher*in“ einen Weiblichen. Warum dann Gendern in der Form gerechter sein soll ergibt sich aber nicht ohne weiteres, wenn man nicht dem Gedanken anhängt, das ein „weiblicher Bias“ wichtig sei im Sinne einer positiven Diskriminierung zum Ausgleich bestehender Nachteile.
Ergänzend sei angemerkt, dass wesentlich mehr Männer an den Tests teilgenommen haben als Frauen, eine Auswertung nach Geschlecht aber nicht erfolgt ist. Hätte ich interessant gefunden.
Alles Evolution 