Information Research Weblog

The distortions wrought on language by political correctness are well known: people fear to use certain common formulations these days, lest they be thought of as biased in one direction or another. For example, consider 'gender': this grammatical term meaning, according to the OED

'Each of the three (or in some languages two) grammatical 'kinds', corresponding more or less to distinctions of sex (and absence of sex) in the objects denoted, into which substantives are discriminated according to the nature of the modification they require in words syntactically associated with them...'

was seized upon by certain interest groups in society (American society, originally) as an alternative to 'sex'. Curious, since a direct translation of the term would mean that one wished to distinguish between persons who had sexual attributes and those that had none - the 'sexed' and the 'sexless'. 'Sex', it was claimed had connotations (undeniably!) of the biological difference between male and female, thereby excluding from classification those who did not fit comfortably into these categories. Fine—no problem with that: if we seek to use in our research, categories that express the full range of sexual variation, then 'gender' is a useful term to employ, and we would probably have categories such as 'heterosexual', 'homosexual', 'lesbian', 'trans-sexual', etc. However, I receive papers for the journal where the only distinction made in analysis is between 'male' and 'female', which are the fundamental sexual categories and, yet, the author talks about 'gender'. So I change all the occurrences of the word to 'sex', in the interest of clarity and accuracy.

The Style Manual for the journal has the following entry:

gender

use sex when referring to male/female categories in data analysis. 'Gender identifies the relations between women and men. Gender relations vary from place to place and over time; they often change in response to altering circumstances. (Sex, by contrast, identifies the biological difference between women and men, which does not change.)' http://www.dfid.gov.uk/aboutdfid/files/glossary_g.htm

I wish that I could persuade all journal editors to adopt this stance, perhaps the poor old English language would then not need to suffer quite so much.