Gender in Chinese and New Writing Technologies

This article examines the linguistic representation of female and male gender in standard Chinese. It analyzes pronouns and person reference nouns in Chinese from a gender perspective, describing the main tendencies of Chinese in the use of genuinely indefinite nouns and covert or false generics. Covert or false generics are expressions that have an inherent gender bias, even though they are neutral structurally . Moreover, this article also undertakes a preliminary analysis of the linguistic representation of genders in a modern writing environment, that is using personal computers with standard (commercial) word processing software. Constant reference is made to this writing situation and to its peculiarities throughout this article. In fact, the visual aspect of Chinese characters (or logographs) and the shift from Chinese standard phonetic transcription (pīnyīn) to characters while writing a text in Chinese entails a totally different and novel approach to word-processing: the software makes suggestions and choices at the word processing level which are not necessary for alphabetic scripts. This article therefore highlights the role of widely used word processing input methods in contributing to perpetuate or even strengthen gender-biased uses of the (written) language.