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Owen Ozier, Ph.D.

The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA

Authors: Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier

Abstract: Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many — sometimes all — nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. Drawing on a broad range of historical and linguistic sources, we construct a measure of the proportion of each country’s population whose native language is a gender language. At the cross-country level, we document a robust negative relationship between prevalence of gender languages and women’s labor force participation. We also show that traditional views of gender roles are more common in countries with more native speakers of gender languages. In African countries where indigenous languages vary in terms of their gender structure, educational attainment and female labor force participation are lower among those whose native languages are gender languages. Cross-country and individual-level differences in labor force participation are large in both absolute and relative terms (when women are compared to men), suggesting that the observed patterns are not driven by development or some unobserved aspect of culture that affects men and women equally. Following the procedures proposed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) and Oster (2017), we show that the observed correlations are unlikely to be driven by unobservables. Gender languages appear to reduce women’s labor force participation and perpetuate support for unequal treatment of women.

JEL codes: J16, Z10, Z13

Keywords: grammatical gender, language, gender, linguistic determinism, labor force participation, educational attainment

Full Text:  “Gendered Language”