Why People Think Gender Pronouns Are Necessary

Pronouns, which include words such as “he” and “her,” are some of the most common words in any language. Pronouns belong to a class of words that linguists call “function words,” which are common words that connect ideas together in a sentence but have little meaning on their own. “The” and “of” are also examples of function words.

Most function words are uncontroversial (e.g., “the”), but in some languages, pronouns can convey information about a person's identity relevant to social controversies. For instance, in English, there are two common personal pronouns: “he” and “she.” This suggests that everyone must either be a “he” or a “she.” This quirk of the English language means that gender must always be mentioned when people talk about each other, implying that gender is always important and relevant to the conversation.

On average, we have found that English speakers who have been socialized with gender pronouns tend to think they are necessary. But although English has pronouns for different (binary) gender identities, “he” for men and “she” for women, other languages do not. Turkish, for instance, has the same pronoun, “o,” for everyone. What’s more, although gender is an important dimension of identity, English does not have pronouns for other important dimensions of identity like age or race.

We were curious about how everyday speakers would reason about pronouns for social identities. We asked about 2,000 adults whether languages should have (binary) gender pronouns, pronouns for people of different racial groups, or neutral pronouns that do not convey identity at all.

The Role of Familiarity

We found that people liked the types of pronouns that were familiar to them in their language. English speakers supported binary gender pronouns the most. Turkish speakers supported neutral pronouns the most. People generally disliked other types of pronouns. In an open comment box at the end of one of our surveys, one person even wrote that race pronouns would “breed racism,” seemingly without making a connection to the analogous possibility that gender pronouns might breed sexism.

Does Ideology also Affect Pronoun Preferences?

But maybe it’s not just that people like what they know. Maybe people’s feelings about a language’s pronouns stem from their ideology. People might want language to reflect social distinctions that they personally find meaningful and “natural.”

To test this idea, we asked participants about their thoughts regarding gender and other social groups. We found that people tended to support the existence of gender pronouns more when they held stronger beliefs that gender is binary and that men and women are different “deep down.” Psychologists refer to these beliefs as “gender essentialism.” Notably, we found the exact same pattern for beliefs about race and race pronouns. Although most people did not like the idea of race pronouns, people who tended to think that different racial groups are really different “deep down” were more open to the idea of race pronouns.

We also asked people about their ideological support for social hierarchies. People vary in how much they think that some groups should be on the top in society and some groups should be on the bottom. Some people think that there should be little to no social hierarchy, whereas other people think that some hierarchy is okay or even desirable.

We found that the more English and Turkish speakers were on board with the idea of society being hierarchical, the more they liked both gender and race pronouns. It is notable that we found such similar effects in both English and Turkish, given how vastly different these two languages and associated cultures are.

Although the correlational studies we’ve described so far give a lot of insight into people’s feelings about gender pronouns, they can’t quite establish that essentialist beliefs about gender are what make people more open to these pronouns. So, we also conducted experiments in English.

We asked participants to read one of two articles. Half the participants read a pro-essentialism article, which encouraged them to think that gender is binary and that men and women are different “deep down.” The other half read an anti-essentialism article, which instead encouraged them to think that gender varies and not everyone belongs to a binary gender group. We found that the anti-essentialism article caused people to be less supportive of binary gender pronouns.

Conclusions

Debate about the use of pronouns and gendered language continues. Gendered language has benefits, such as making women visible in male-dominated domains (“a surgeon… she…”). It also has drawbacks, such as possibly increasing gender stereotyping that limits women. Gender pronouns may make gender seem important and relevant in every context. If gender is not, in fact, important in every context, then speakers of a language can consider making a change. After all, language is a set of conventions people use for communicating with each other. It can be tweaked as people please. 

For Further Reading

Bailey, A. H., Dembroff, R., Wodak, D., Ikizer, E., & Cimpian, A. (2024). People's beliefs about pronouns reflect both the language they speak and their ideologies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(5), 1388–1406. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001565

Dembroff, R., & Wodak, D. (2018). He/she/they/ze. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 5(14), 371–406.  https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0005.014

Atir, S. (2022). Girlboss? Highlighting versus downplaying gender through language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(8), 623–625. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.05.001

Lewis, M., & Lupyan, G. (2020). Gender stereotypes are reflected in the distributional structure of 25 languages. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(10), 1021-1028. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0918-6

April Bailey is an incoming Lecturer (equivalent to an assistant professor) at the University of Edinburgh. She investigates gender and other groups using approaches from psychology, philosophy, and computational linguistics.

Robin Demobroff is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University working on feminist and LGBTQ philosophy.

Daniel Wodak is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania working on moral, legal, social, and political philosophy.

Elif Ikizer is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her research is focused on stigma, culture, and language.

Andrei Cimpian is Professor of Psychology at New York University. One strand of his research investigates how language is shaped by—and in turn shapes—how people reason about the world.