"Speaking for gender equality"

Abstract

Adolescents’ aspirations are influenced by gender stereotypes, whereby girls tend to pursue careers in communal roles while boys tend to pursue STEM careers and agentic positions. Language and linguistic interventions appear to be a promising avenue. In French, a grammatical gender language, the generic use of the masculine form – although grammatically correct – leads to a male-bias in mental representations while gender-fair forms generate more gender-equal representations of occupational success, jobholders, and aspirations in children and adolescents. Building on these issues, this thesis aimed to interweave social psychology and psycholinguistics to examine the influence of gender stereotypes and gender-fair language on adolescents’ aspirations. A theoretical framework interweaving the Social Role Theory (Eagly & Wood, 2012) and language was proposed, informing the design of the conducted three studies. In all three studies, adolescents were presented with job descriptions of gender stereotyped occupations. Descriptions were manipulated, namely they contained various language and linguistic manipulations. Aspirations were measured through interest and anticipated sense of belonging. Two studies were conducted in French, while one in English. The findings indicate that the influence of gender stereotypes on adolescents’ aspirations remain strong, despite the language and linguistic manipulations attempted to mitigate them. These findings highlight the different mechanisms in girls’ and boys’ aspirations. Plus, these studies examined aspirations not only in STEM but also in HEED, a domain often overlooked in prior research. The discussion examines the potential of linguistic interventions to reduce gender stereotypes and outlines implications for equality policies and future research.