I was going to write a more detailed reply, but seeing the literature cited in the book linked by Conchis, I should probably read up on the topic before expressing any further opinions. It could be that I’m underestimating the magnitude of such effects.
That said, one huge difficulty with issues of prejudice and discrimination in general is that what looks like a bias caused by malice, ignorance, or unconscious error is often in fact an instance of accurate statisticaldiscrimination. Rational statistical discrimination is usually very hard to disentangle from various factors that supposedly trigger irrational biases, since all kinds of non-obvious correlations might be lurking everywhere. At the same time, a supposed finding of a factor that triggers irrational bias is a valuable and publishable result for people researching such things, so before I accept any of these findings, I’ll have to give them a careful look.
Agreed that attribution of things like malice, ignorance, error, and bias to people is tricky… much as with evil, earlier.
This is why I reframed your original question (asking me whether I thought gendered language introduced bias to a significant degree) in a more operational form, actually.
In any case, though, I endorse holding off on expressing opinions while one gathers data (for all that I don’t seem to do it very much myself).
I was going to write a more detailed reply, but seeing the literature cited in the book linked by Conchis, I should probably read up on the topic before expressing any further opinions. It could be that I’m underestimating the magnitude of such effects.
That said, one huge difficulty with issues of prejudice and discrimination in general is that what looks like a bias caused by malice, ignorance, or unconscious error is often in fact an instance of accurate statistical discrimination. Rational statistical discrimination is usually very hard to disentangle from various factors that supposedly trigger irrational biases, since all kinds of non-obvious correlations might be lurking everywhere. At the same time, a supposed finding of a factor that triggers irrational bias is a valuable and publishable result for people researching such things, so before I accept any of these findings, I’ll have to give them a careful look.
Agreed that attribution of things like malice, ignorance, error, and bias to people is tricky… much as with evil, earlier.
This is why I reframed your original question (asking me whether I thought gendered language introduced bias to a significant degree) in a more operational form, actually.
In any case, though, I endorse holding off on expressing opinions while one gathers data (for all that I don’t seem to do it very much myself).