Gender bias in the Chinese epicene pronoun ta

Abstract

Unlike all the failed attempts proposed to mitigate gender bias in English, the Chinese language—which has an epicene pronoun, ta—took an opposite path: changes were implemented to make the third person pronoun gender specific by inserting a feminine third person pronoun and a non-human third person pronoun in its writing system (which did not affect speech). As a result, written Chinese became a mirror image of English (having the equivalents of he, she, and it). In this empirical study on gender bias in the Chinese language, we find that this institutional effort has also failed despite a century's implementation in the educational system of the country: the language exhibits a dominating male-as-norm bias as well as bias based on stereotyping, regardless of participants' gender and age groups. Our study therefore contributes to the understanding of language change as well as gender bias in language.