Our words matter. The way we use language matters.

It shapes how we think, influences our intrinsic paradigms and affects the way we engage with the world. And, I'm frankly sick of men still being used as the default in everyday language.

Not sure what I mean?

Have you ever talked to an acquaintance about your therapist and have them respond with "oh, what did he say?" Have you ever had someone fuss over your dog and ask "what's his name?" Have you ever complained about your landlord to a colleague and heard them say "you should email him."

Man is an assumption, woman requires a specification.

It's this pattern of thinking and speaking that subtly weaves just another gender bias through our world.

Existentialist author, Simone de Beauvoir describes this phenomenon in her book, The Second Sex. She shows how society views men as the "default" while women are the "other". Men are the standard and act as the reference point for the human being – where as women and other genders are simply a variation to the prototype.

Ironically, female is actually our biological default. All embryos are phenotypically female. It is only after six to seven weeks of gestation that the foetus might develop male sex characteristics. But despite our biology, the male-as-norm characteristics of language persists. So much so, that in our language woman requires a suffix, or the implicit assumption is man. Host, hostess. Actor, actress. Benefactor, benefactress.

This phenomenon has and continues to shape misogyny in our society. And the impacts are real, tangible and harmful.

The surgeon riddle

I first heard of the surgeon riddle in my first semester of psychology. Our professor told us a story.

A father and his son are taking a fishing trip, they drive around a treacherous bend. The car crashes and the father dies.

A year later, the son is driving around the same bend. His car skids off the road in the same spot, and crashes. He is rushed to hospital.

Once in the hospital, his doctor looks at him and says: "I can't operate on him, that's my son!"

We were then asked to raise our hand if we saw a problem with the story. The pang of sadness that overwhelmed me when I saw that everyone except for myself and one other person had raised their hand.

Just two people in an entire class of psychology students intrinsically understood that his mother was clearly the doctor. That women and other genders can be doctors. That 'doctor' does not automatically mean 'man'.

The story is, of course, designed to trick you. To make you think about your own internalised biases. But this was the first time I'd considered how truly pervasive this problem is. And started to really question what this means.

Cristiano Ronaldo – or Christine Sinclair?

In a round of pub trivia, a question arose: "who has scored the most international goals in football?" My immediate answer, Canadian legend: Christine Sinclair. I'm a fan, and I'd recently been talking about her with a Canadian friend of mine – I knew she had 190 goals under her belt. You can imagine my surprise, when my answer was marked wrong and corrected with Cristiano Ronaldo, who has 135.

I did walk up to the trivia host to explain. They humoured me and gave me the point, but remarked with a wry smile.

"Well, you know what I mean when talking football."

That moment stuck with me for weeks. His message was implicit, but clear. I should automatically assume that he was talking about men.

It just so happened that a few months after this incident, a friend sent me the ad from Correct The Internet that used this exact example. I couldn't believe it. Finally, a view into how harmful this use of language can truly be.

I took to the internet to see if there had been any progress. Nope, none, nada. Even now when you Google "Who's scored the most international goals in football", it still brings up results for men's football and Cristiano Ronaldo as a first touch point.

A world where women don’t have an equal presence at the table

"All members of a category do not have equal status in the mind of the human perceiver," de Beauvoir says.

When our language consistently and persistently uses the male-as-norm convention, subtle cues are sewn and socialised into our psyches from a young age. It's no wonder so many people instantly visualise a man when they hear the title 'doctor'. Or 'lawyer'. Or 'pilot'. Or 'soccer player'. It's this unconscious bias that shapes how people perceive the world; and impacts the way we treat people based on gender. 

A 2017 article by Chelsea A Harris et al on gender-fair language in the medical community found that male-as-norm language (as well as other invalidating language) was creating poorer outcomes for women in medicine. It found that male-as-norm language created a reality where women are excluded from important discourse: "the accumulation of these and other micro-invalidations, potentiate constructs where women don’t have an equal presence at the table – operating or boardroom."

The article also found that this language was contributing to professional disadvantage for women: "we predispose female surgeons to face conflicts between their gender roles and professional advancement."

Unfortunately, since these biases built on our language occur on a subconscious and ingrained level, it becomes difficult for us to fully address them. And more troublingly, we are building our subconscious biases into the technology now shaping our world.

We built robots and made them misogynists

You probably remember the story that blew up in 2018 about Amazon's AI recruitment software. When the Amazon team delved into why the AI kept serving them the same kinds of candidates, they discovered the software was deliberately excluding women.

The problem? Amazon's AI models were trained on historical data and existing language used by the company. In doing so, the AI taught itself that men were preferable candidates and began penalising CVs that features the word "women's".

We're now seven years on from this story, and little – if anything – has changed. In fact, there is increasing evidence that barriers for women are only being heightened by AI and other technologies.

It's not just AI either, you can find these biases in a standard Google search too. I was recently Googling "world tennis rankings" to understand where Elina Svitolina sits in the list. It felt like a punch to the gut that my Google search was met with a list of only men.

"Our linguistic biases have engineered a reality where Google – nothing more than a series of 1s and 0s strung together to build an algorithmic model – has learned sexism."

It assumed that when you generically ask for "world tennis rankings" that the searcher would only be interested in the men. The women's rankings weren't even next to the men's in a different tab.

When I tried to qualify the search with "women's world tennis rankings", there was no breakout box at all. As if the women's game doesn't even warrant a mention.

It may seem small. But what does this slice of information mean for a world that is increasingly powered by algorithms and AI? What does it teach younger generations? And what does it continue to reinforce in those who hold such biases?

It took Wimbledon until 2007 to pay their women tennis players the same as the men. But there is still a huge inequality in what women and men are paid in ATP and equivalent WTP tournaments. And the justification you always hear for this? The women's game just doesn't garner the same attention.

But how can women's sports have an equal chance for attention when systems like Google are unable to surface information about women's sports, even when someone is actively searching for these answers? The way we use language has taught our algorithms and large language models how to be sexist. And this technology is now part of upholding poorer outcomes for women.

The words we use matter

"Taking the position that our current approach is justified because ‘it has always been our approach’ is not tenable'," said Harris et al. Fixing this problem requires all of us, together. And it's about dismantling the status quo.

"Academics, time after time, laud the power of simply neutralising our language."

What does that look like? It means writing 'police officer' instead of 'policeman'. It means avoiding the 'he' assumption and saying 'a teacher cares for their students'. It means saying "good morning team" instead of "good morning guys/ladies".

Yes, there will always be growing pains and a period of acclimatisation when adopting something new. Especially in the current cultural landscape where any change is hit with a 'woke' red stamp and rejected by half the population. But the rest of us must push through to create the standard that we want for our future generations, and to engineer the social architecture that we want technology to learn from. Our words matter.

So, maybe next time someone nudges you to say 'spokesperson' instead of  'spokesman', don't roll your eyes.

Editor’s note: in the context of this article, we use 'female' to denote people with anatomically female sex characteristics. We use 'women' to denote gender and to refer to people who identify as women. There may be exceptions when language is taken from a direct quote.