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conchis comments on Offense versus harm minimization - Less Wrong
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My above comment was made in a bit of jest, as I hope is clear. Still, some people do make a deep moral issue over "sexist" language, and insofar as they do, moral condemnation of much more heavily gendered languages than English is an inevitable logical consequence.
Regarding the supposed biases arising due to gendered language, do you think that they exist to a significant degree in practice? While it's not a watertight argument to the contrary, I still think it's significant that, to my knowledge, nobody has ever demonstrated any cross-cultural correlation between gender-related norms and customs and the linguistic role of gender. (For what that's worth, of all Indo-European languages, the old I-E gender system has been most thoroughly lost in Persian, which doesn't even have the he-she distinction.)
Also, when I reflect on my own native language and the all-pervasive use of masculine as the default gender, I honestly can't imagine any plausible concrete examples of biases analogous to your hypothetical example with height. Of course, I may be biased in this regard myself.
I agree that some people do treat as moral failings many practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.
I also think that some people react to that by defending practices that, to my mind, are better treated as mistakes.
I'm not sure.
One way I might approach the question is to teach an experimental subject some new words to denote new roles, and then have the subjects select people to fill those roles based on resumes. By manipulating the genderedness of the name used for the role (e.g., "farner," "farness," or "farnist") and the nominal sex of the candidate (e.g., male or female), we could determine what effect an X-gendered term had on the odds of choosing a Y-sexed candidate.
I have no idea if that study has been performed.
So, for example, would I expect English-speakers (on average) selecting a candidate for the role of "farness" to select a female candidate more often than for the role of "farner"?
Yes, I think so. Probably not a huge difference, though. Call it a 65% confidence for a statistically significant difference.
What's your estimate? (Or, if you'd rather operationalize the question differently, go for it.)
My understanding of the relevant research* is that it's a fairly consistent finding that masculine generics (a) do cause people to imagine men rather than women, and (b) that this can have negative effects ranging from impaired recall, comprehension, and self-esteem in women, to reducing female job applications. (Some of these negative effects have also been established for men from feminine generics as well, which favours using they/them/their rather than she/her as replacements.)
* There's an overview of some of this here (from p.26).
I wonder if they tested whether individuals suffer similar negative effects from plural generics.