Gender neutrality in English

Non-sexist, gender-neutral, or politically correct language is writing or speech which avoids perpetuating what is perceived as sexism.

Calling this type of language "non-sexist language" is a loaded term, as it implies that failure to use this type of language is automatically sexist. Unfortunately there is an absence of neutral terms for this phenomenon, so it will have to do.

Common Positions

Views on non-sexist language can be split into approximately four groups:

People who believe that non-sexist language is a good thing, use it themselves, and try to enforce it on everyone else. These people often argue passionately for non-sexist language at every opportunity.
People who believe that non-sexist language is a good thing, use it themselves, but do not wish to enforce it on everyone else. These people may try to persuade others of the merits of non-sexist language, but are generally less vehement in their arguments.
People who believe that non-sexist language is neither good nor bad. These people sometimes use non-sexist language, and sometimes use more traditional forms of expression.
People who believe that non-sexist language is a bad thing, and do not use it themselves. These people may try to persuade others of the problems with non-sexist language, with more or less vehemence.

History

Many of the modern masculine terms in use today orginated as gender neutral terms in old english. For example, the word 'man' was orginally gender neutral and qualified to specify male or female. While the male qualification died out, the female wo (which produced woman) survived, leaving 'man' with both its original gender-neutral meaning (people) and its gender-specific meaning, male.

Add later history here

Disputed Issues

There are a wide range of disputed issues in the debate over non-sexist language. Are there inherently sexist language forms, and if so, what are they? If they exist, should they be changed? If they should be changed, how should this be achieved?

Are some uses of language inherently sexist?

Advocates of non-sexist language, including many feminists, argue that traditional language fails to reflect the presence of women in society adequately. In general, they complain about a number of issues:

Over-use of gender-specific pronouns like "he".
Use of "man" to refer to all people.
Over-use of gender-specific job titles.
Use of Miss and Mrs. (see Ms.).
non-parallel usage, such as "man and wife".
Stereotypical words such as virile and ladylike

According to advocates of non-sexist language, there are various problems with these uses:

They marginalize women and create the impression of a male-dominated society.
They can be patronising, for example treating women only as marriage material
They can perpetuate stereotypes about the "correct" way for a man or woman to behave.

Opponents of non-sexist language do not accept these arguments.

Some regard the whole thing as "political correctness gone mad", as it was ridiculed in the 1980s British satirical show Spitting Image.
Some people believe that while these usages may, on the surface, appear to be gender-biased, in practice most people think of them and use them as gender-neutral.
Some people disagree with feminism and argue that men and women are sufficiently different that these differences are rightly embedded in the language.

A deeper variant of these arguments involves the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the suggestion that our language shapes our thought processes and that in order to eliminate sexism we would do well to eliminate "sexist" forms from our language. Some feminists are dismissive of these ideas, viewing non-sexist language as window-dressing which merely hides, not changes, sexist attitudes. They typically do not oppose such language, but rather see it as an irrelevance.

Enforcement, Persuasion, or Evolution?

A tiny minority of advocates for non-sexist language argue that these "sexist" usages should be banned. It is unclear how this would be achieved. Hate speech legislation does exist in some countries, but applies to much more clear-cut cases of prejudice.

The majority of advocates for non-sexist language wish to proceed by persuasion rather than enforcement. One tool of this persuasion is creating guidelines (see below) that indicate how they believe language should be used. Another tool is simply to make use of non-sexist language oneself, and lead by example.

Some opponents of non-sexist language argue that a change in language should evolve organically from changing public attitudes towards gender issues, rather than be achieved either by enforcement, or by persuasion.

Neologising

Frequently examples of non-sexist language have a long history that predates the feminist movement, such as firefighter and singular they. While these terms are sometimes denigrated by opponents as neologisms, they in fact have a long history that predates the women's liberation movement.

At other times new terms have indeed been created, such as Ms. or womyn. The issue is confused by satirists who invent extreme examples of the supposed consequences of non-sexist language, such as epersoncipation.

Some critics accuse advocates of non-sexist language of "re-gendering" language, replacing masculine in some cases by feminine terms that are equally sexist. Other critics argue that non-sexist language violates the rules of proper grammar and style.

Guidelines

Many different authorities have presented guidelines on how to use non-sexist language. Wikipedia is not a style guide, so we present a selection of such sources here.

American Philosophical Association - published 1986
Linguistic Society of America
University of Western Sydney - last revised 1995
...

Many dictionaries, stylebooks, and some authoritative guides now counsel the writer to follow the new guidelines. However many publishing houses, dictionaries and stylebooks decline to accept these guidelines, believing them to amount to the 'bastardisation' of language for political purposes.

These guidelines, though accepted by many, remain in some contexts controversial, and are applied to differing degrees among english speakers worldwide. often reflecting different cultures and language structure, for example American English in contrast to British English. They are also impacted upon, depending on whether a person uses english as their first language or as a second language, regional variants or whether their form of english is based on grammatical structures inherited from a no longer widely used other language (for example, Hiberno-english) or owes its linguistic structure to earlier old english or Elizabethan english. In these cases, language structure from their native tongue or linguistic inheritance may enter into their terminology.

Non-sexist language in other languages

The situation of 'non-sexist' usage is very different in languages that have masculine and feminine grammatical gender, such as French, German, and Spanish, simply because it is impossible to construct a gender-neutral sentence the way it can be done in English. For example, in French, the masculine gender supersedes the feminine; la femme et l'homme (the woman and the man) has the pronoun ils (they-masculine).

Accordingly, most of the focus has been on more concrete problems such as job titles. Due to the presence of grammatical gender, the strategy is the exact opposite of that of English: creating feminine job titles rather than eliminating them. This is based on the idea that it is insulting to call a woman (for example) le médecin (the (masculine) doctor), as if she changed sex or became somehow more mannish when she went to work.

French

In French, feminine job titles are created by adding -e (l'avocate), -eure (la docteure), -euse (la travailleuse), -esse (la mairesse), or nothing in some cases such as -iste or -logue (la psychologue). More generally, nonsexist styles can include the use of brackets or capital letters to insert feminine endings (étudiant(e)s or étudiantEs) or repeat gendered words (toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens).

Words that formerly referred to a dignitary's wife (l'ambassadrice) can be used to refer to a woman in that position; this, like other non-sexist forms, is much more common in Quebec than in France. Although the marriage titles have mainly dropped out of use, many cite the possible confusion as a reason for continuing to use such as Madame le Président or Madame l'ambassadeur. For this reason, these remain the most frequent, at least in France.

Spanish

In Spanish, it is usually quite easy to change an -o to an -a, or to add an -a to an ending such as -or (la camarera, la doctora). Other endings can be left alone or changed (la juez but la alcaldesa). -ista is left alone. (One problem is el policía, "police officer", since la policía means "the police force". The only useful feminine term is la mujer policía.) A fashion current in Spain is to use the at-sign (@) to replace -o or -a, especially in political writing (¡Ciudadan@s!)

German

In German, creating a feminine job title is usually done by adding "-in" to the word in question. Job descriptions are usually formulated addressing both sexes ("Informatiker oder Informatikerin"). Sometimes a form of contraction with capitalization inside the word is used ("InformatikerIn"), which is considered by some people as a corruption of the language, especially if it is overdone by creating feminine forms of gender neutral words (for example a German feminist who called a group of non-feminist women "arschlöcherinnen" - female assholes)

Please add more languages and examples.