Are speakers of languages like French, which assign a gender to all nouns, more sexist than those without?
No; why would it? In general, grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender. It’s unfortunate that the same word is used to describe both, since it causes people to infer an association which for most languages is nonexistent, or at best tenuous.
You can find pervasive (biological) gender inequality even in societies where the language spoken has no grammatical gender at all, such as Hungarian.
I was probably unclear. The hypothesis is that forcing neutral objects to have language gender leads a speaker to have build stronger mental stereotypes about gender characteristics that might carry over into relations with humans, more than if the language didn’t force that mental sorting. As psychonaut said, it “causes people to infer an association”, what impact does that association have on attitudes towards actual genders?
Is there any research that maps sexism levels of societies against the language spoken? Or perhaps psychological/neurological research at an individual level.
Probably none; you conveniently left out the main part of my statement, which was that this association does not actually exist. The word “gender” has distinct meanings in biology and linguistics, just as the word “bit” has distinct meanings in computing and animal husbandry. All “gender” is in linguistics is a class system for nouns which triggers certain patterns of inflections in other words. Though grammatical and biological gender may have some overlap in some languages (which is historically why they share the same name in English), as a general rule, they do not. Many, if not most, languages’ gender systems, if they exist at all, partition nouns into classes that have no relation whatsoever to biological gender, and it would be absurd to therefore claim that speakers of these languages’ perception of or attitude towards biological gender is affected by these systems.
A common misconception.
Not sexism, per se, but there is research evidence that gender in language does shape thought. Link.
I said “in general”. The findings you refer to do not (and indeed, could not possibly) apply to gendered languages in general. In fact, they may not even apply to those specific gendered languages used in the study; Boroditsky’s work has been controversial among linguists. Pop science journalists, on the other hand, seem to eat it up.
By the way, this thread seems a good place to link to a recent Dinosaur Comic lampooning the association between grammatical and natural gender. 
A more direct reference to the Boroditsky study is made a couple comics later.
I find myself wondering what people would make of the fact that while my native language has three grammatical genders - masculine, feminine and neuter - my particular regional dialect lacks the feminine, so we treat feminine words as masculine. We are no more or less sexist than the rest of the country, as far as I can tell. A girl is no less a girl to me, using the masculine form of the noun, than she is to my cousins who use the feminine form.
I’m no linguist, but grammatical gender really has no biological associations for us. We learn the rules of grammatical gender as soon as we learn to speak, long before we are taught what grammatical gender is. Children learning to speak quickly discover that there are distinct groups of words that are treated in certain ways. Biological gender doesn’t necessarily correspond with grammatical, so there is no reason for them to think of these noun groups in male and female terms. They don’t go to school and suddenly change their world view when they are taught that all those words that end in a certain letter are neuter.
This is a completely different scenario from when foreigners are learning the language, when a set of grammar rules is presented and lists of words are grouped in gender classes. Foreigners tend to obsess over gender because they basically have to. That is also my experience from learning languages where genders don’t correspond with my first language.
In historical terms, the grammar existed long before there were words to describe it, before the terms masculine and feminine were applied.
Interesting answers. I now understand what you were saying Psychonaut, and any opinion that uses Dinosaur Comics is okay by me. I do recall how native speakers learn the gender differently. Yet, I’m somehow unconvinced. The Boroditsky experiments make intuitive sense to me.
I imagine there must somewhere be an index of sexism by country. (If not, there’s a thesis subject for someone. You’re welcome.) If there is, one could match that up against whether the native tongue has gendered nouns or not and draw some conclusion.
Once one considers the answer to that question, then by the same token, are speakers of languages that have no distinction in the third person between male and female (that is, they don’t have “he” or “she”, but only “it”), like Hungarian, less sexist than English? I doubt it.
In a linguistics class I took, they mentioned that for a long time there was a steadfast notion among linguists that grammatical gender absolutely did not influence speakers’ perceptions of gender at all. However, it was also mentioned (by doctorate students and professors, mind you) that this is starting to be called into question more by some recent studies. So nowadays, at least at my university, it’s treated as indeterminate, on the side of “if it does, it probably affects very little.”
A couple of observations about languages that I know something about:
French has two genders, masculine and feminine. However, you can use feminine words to describe male people and masculine words to describe female people. For example, a man can refer to himself as “une personne” (a person, feminine), while a girl can be referred to as “un enfant” (a child, masculine). How does that affect perception, as masculine “enfants” grow up to be feminine “personnes”?
Japanese has no grammatical gender, but social gender differences permeate the language. At one time women even wrote with a different script (hiragana) than men (who used kanji) – though that no longer happens. However men and women tend to use different vocabulary – particularly pronouns and some particles – and different verb endings. The common words for “I” – “watashi”, “boku” and “ore” – don’t have grammatical gender, but someone using “watashi” will be a girl, woman or older man, while a person using “boku” or “ore” will be a boy or younger man.
So, in its way, Japanese (without grammatical gender) is more sexist than French (with grammatical gender).
This concept is difficult for English speakers to grasp because while our language has three genders, masculine and feminine are very restricted and closely tied to natural gender, with the vast majority of nouns in the neuter category. Of the common and inanimate proper nouns, only ships and boats, cars, nations, and cats (to my admittedly imperfect knowledge) are treated as feminine, and even that is fading. I would say “it” in all cases, and it always sounds weird when someone refers to a ship or a country as “she.”
In other languages, the connection between grammatical and natural gender is much weaker. The relative overlap between the two has got to have some effect: if 95% of your masculine nouns actively sport a penis, the other 5% might sound pretty male, while if fewer than one percent refer to beings with Y chromosomes you might not perceive the connection so strongly.
This is belied by one observation: In at least some languages (and I admit I don’t know much about very many languages), while clearly inanimate objects (desk, table, chair) are arbitrarily assigned to one “gender” or the other, animate objects (people and sometimes animals) that clearly have two biological genders also have two forms of the word for them.
For example, in English the words “teacher” or “doctor” have no gender assigned to them. But in other languages (Hebrew is the language I know a tad about), there is one word for “male-teacher” or “male-doctor” and another word (just the masculine word with a feminine suffix added) for a “female-teacher” or a “female-doctor”. This applies to animals too.
I asked a Hebrew speaker once why teachers and doctors should have their gender always specified in the words they use. (Aside from the obvious reason that it’s just always been that way in the language since ancient times.) He answered something to the effect: Because it’s part of what they are. As best I could understand his explanation, he viewed a “male-teacher” and a “female-teacher” as two distinctly different objects, thus needing distinct words.
This suggests that linguistic gender does affect gender-thinking. – Admittedly, what I have here is no more than one anecdotal data-point.
Modern English is a highly (but not totally) non-gendered language, despite the common complaints about it. Only a few (admittedly troublesome) pronouns and a few nouns have gender. The nouns are things like host/hostess, steward/stewardess, waiter/waitress, lion/lioness. There was a Star Trek episode in which a virtual image of Abraham Lincoln appeared and called Uhura a “Negress”.
There’s enough data out there to keep you busy for years. How you define sexism and correlate it with language is a different story altogether. Here’s a starting point:
The top 20 is pretty evenly split. It may be worth noting that Norwegian and Icelandic have three genders. Danish and Swedish now only have common and neuter, the masculine and feminine distinction no longer exists. Finnish does not have gendered nouns. Irish does.
At one time in English, when the default was male and female examples were rare, people would have talked about a “lady doctor” or a “lady teacher”. However, while social gender is very clear there, to a linguist the terms “lady doctor” and “lady teacher” have no grammatical gender.
I assumed it evolved out of some kind of personification. Do you (or anyone) know more about the origins of gender in language?
There are really two questions there:
(1) The origin of gender in languages generally.
(2) The origin of languages in Indo-European languages.
They are different questions because, as far as I know, Indo-European languages are the only ones with the masculine-feminine-neuter system (which sometimes has evolved into a two-gender system like French). So Proto-Indo-European probably did divide nouns into male, female and neuter, but other early languages apparently did not.
It is used to describe both in English, and I’m sure in other languages as well. In Spanish and with some unfortunate, recent exceptions, living beings have a sexo while words have género: no confusion at all. Derivations follow the same pattern; for example, our word for “genderless” is asexuado and most flowers are bisexuadas, having both male and female bits.
Just to add another data point here, in India, Hindi(Indo-european) has a gender associated with most nouns, while south Indian languages, which do not belong to the Indo-European family, do not have genders for nouns. Hindi speaking areas tend to be more patriarchal and equality between the genders is lower compared to non Hindi speaking areas.