Gender in the British press

Abstract

This article aims to show that the demande formulated by feminists for the introduction and the implementation of non-sexist vocabulary and grammatical constructions have received no real acknowlegement in the British press. Indeed, a study carried out on a corpus of one hundred articles taken from both tabloids and quality dailies brings to light two parallel tendencies : the persistance of a certain number of stereotypes traditionally associated with women and a reticence to resort to terms pin-pointed as non-sexist. The relationship that can be drawn between these two tendencies shows that the sole availability of non-sexist terms is no guarantee that they will actually be used.