Reddit reviews Man-Made Language

Yes, men and women are different, of course, but logically, men and women are literally as similar as you get. There is nothing more similar to a man than a woman. A male lion? A male fly? A truck? I think we would all agree that a woman shares much more similarities with a man than anything else in the world. We can also agree that there is nothing more "common" about being a man than being a woman. Yet, our culture would make you think there are simply more men in the world. The world caters to men.

I approach the topic with theories about Othering in mind. The idea is that there is something we consider the "norm"-- that which is not named, that which is invisible, exnominated. We consider "maleness" to be "the norm." Let's take the film industry as an example: most speaking roles in movies are offered to men.. I found one study that examined perceptions of gender equality in film, too. (I cannot find it now-- apologies.) When a crowd is composed of 50% males and 50% females, the audience perception is that there are way more females than males-- we are not used to seeing equal representation.

Hell, even in our language, we assume male to be the norm (take the words mister and mistress, for example. Linguistically, "mister" is the base word, and the "ess" is the "something extra...also, the words used to have similar meanings but, like many words, the female-centered word acquired negative meaning over time). As another example, "they" used to be the correct gender-neutral pronoun, whether singular or plural. In 1850, a group of all male grammarians decided to change the official rule so that "he" would be the gender-neutral pronoun because, by the all-male group logic, males were the “more comprehensive” gender.

I think the first study might be from Dale Spender's Man-Made Language:

http://gunpowder-tea.tumblr.com/post/74924297126/madmaudlingoes-bropakpro-touch-my-cuboner