GENELLI

Gender inequality remains a pressing issue in our society. Women are underrepresented in many decision-making positions and the gender pay gap remains at 16%. Whether or how language contributes to forming and transporting gender stereotypes has sparked intense scientific and public debate. In German, masculine role nouns are still often used in a generic sense to address people of unknown gender (“der Kunde”) or to refer to mixed groups (“die Wissenschaftler”). Psycholinguistic studies show that this can be a source for a male bias. However, it is not just the grammar that biases readers and listeners toward a male interpretation, but also semantic  stereotypes and the actual participation of women in the respective groups. To adequately study the interaction between socio-economic conditions, psychological gender stereotypes, and language use, an interdisciplinary approach is required. The proposed cooperation between the project “Empirical Gender Linguistics” at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS Mannheim), the research group “Gender Economics” at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), and the Center of Cognitive Science (Freiburg University) brings together excellent researchers from linguistics, economics, and psycholinguistics . The project goals are twofold: First, we will assemble an extensive list of role nouns in language use and collect linguistic, economic, and psychological variables relevant for interpreting these role nouns (GENELLI database). In doing so, we explore the (in)dependence of grammatical gender, and in particular the use of the generic masculine, on extra-linguistic factors, providing a blueprint for other grammatical gender languages. Second, we will conduct several empirical studies using our GENELLI list addressing questions about the interplay between language, gender and cognition. Employing and combining state-of-the art methods from all three research areas, we will gain insight into the language-cognition-interface when verbalising/linguising  gender(ed) roles.