Women and men face double standards.
No, I don't mean just the gender pay gap,
I'm also talking about the different words we use
to describe men and women with the same characteristics.
While he is described as charismatic,
she's often described as bubbly or vivacious.
You wouldn't describe him as an airhead, he's just simple.
She's an airhead.
She's bossy.
He's assertive.
Women are far more likely than men
to be described as gossiping.
If you don't believe me, after this film,
try a Google images search for gossip.
Unlike French, German, Spanish, Polish,
practically any other European language,
English doesn't have gender inherent in most of its words.
But some of those words become gendered anyway when choose
different words to describe men and women.
Feisty is a classic example.
It's rare to hear a man described as feisty.
Sure, you could hear about a feisty boxer
but it's a lot more likely to describe a flyweight
than a heavyweight.
That's why some women hear feisty
as applying a kind of figurative or literal smallness
in them and hence a note of condescension.
Academics from the University of Illinois
and the University of California analyzed over 100,000 works
of fiction written between 1800 and 2010.
They identified words connecting to male or female
characters and the actions they performed.
The study showed that the word house used to be a strongly
male term in the 1800s.
House was associated with the landed gentry
in Victorian era.
But as the 20th century wore on,
house became a slightly more female term
associated with domesticity.
The writer Ben Blatt found that the verbs
most associated with the pronoun she in classic fiction are:
shivered, wept, murmured, screamed, and married.
The most commonly associated with he are:
muttered, grinned, shouted, chuckled, and killed.
An algorithm used by those academics who studied house
tries to determine a character's gender based only
on the language used in descriptions and dialogue.
These predictions were right 75% of the time
for books written around 1800 but that falls to just about
65% of the time in books written around 2000.
In other words, the vocabulary used to describe
women and men is becoming more blurred.
So the gender stereotypes like feisty are less common
than they used to be.
Nearly all words have different shades of meaning.
While the speaker intends the positive one,
the hearer often hears the negative.
And that's a good reason to avoid compliments that convey
a note of surprise.
Lane, you are so articulate.
Really?
Scouring your mind for a vocative language isn't easy
but working hard to be original and to avoid giving
unwanted offense can only be a good thing.