Language and Gender

After reading Bei Yu's article and listening in on Mr. Robertson's lecture on language and gender, my understanding of these two thing's relationships was widened.  I never thought thoroughly about how our language is differed between genders.  The way we use our language can treat a gender a certain way, either in a negative or positive way.  Unfortunately after listening to Mr. Robertson's lecture and reading the article it seems like the female gender suffers more so than its male counterpart in this way.  The use of our language is taught to us at a young age, and in order to change the way our language is used towards females we will have to start this ourselves, with the next young generation.  Mr. Robertson said, "From an early age boys are taught that they are allowed to assert their will more than girls", and this is something that should be taught differently.  Women should not only be the sympathizers in conversation, but they should also be able to assert themselves freely.

At an early age kids are exposed to this different use in language between gender, without even noticing.  Mr. Robertson had put up a chart on the whiteboard, the chart showed the differences between boys and girls games and stories.  The main theme in the boys category was that the objective was mostly about winning and being the best, while in the girls games the objective was more about community and using others to achieve a goal.  For some reason kids are taught at a young age that males are the ones who should lead, while females are the ones that need to work together to accomplish something.  This is something that kids should not be exposed to as these habits will grow on them as they grow older and as we read in Bed Yu's article, it explains why woman are not as assertive as men even as they age.

Bei Yu's article was ble to give strong evidence of these different use of language between genders.  After listening to the lecture I was able to read back through the article and understand the background of this use of language.  This use of language grows on females and their assertiveness lacks sometimes because of what they were exposed to at a young age.  It was interesting reading about how language was also used in the workplace.  "In general, differential patterns in language use, if found to exist across professional contexts, lend strong support to the idea of gendered language"(p.119).    Depending on the profession there was some stereotypical female language used and sometimes language was not differed between gender.   

Both Mr. Robertson's lecture and Bee Yu's article on language and gender was a great start to the class.  The lecture was interesting to me and opened my mind up to how we use of language and how it affects genders.  Not thinking about it as a child, but now understanding how gender roles are presented at a young age it is something that should be changed.  Males are not the only ones in this world with a voice and females should be able to speak their mind, which will greatly benefit both genders.  As said by Mr. Robertson "language is power" and in order to change how genders are treated through language, we must be aware of how we use our language and the true meaning of our words.