Language influences public attitudes toward gender equality

Does the way we speak affect what we think about gender equality? Languages vary by how much they require speakers to attend to gender. Genderless tongues (e.g., Estonian) do not oblige speakers to designate the gender of objects, while gendered tongues do (e.g., Russian). By neglecting to distinguish between male and female objects, we hypothesize that speakers of genderless tongues will express more liberalized attitudes toward gender equality. Using an experiment that assigned the interview language to 1,200 Estonian/Russian bilinguals, we find support for this proposition. In a second experiment, we replicate this result and demonstrate its absence for attitudes without obvious gender referents. We also provide some evidence suggesting that language effects weaken when social norms about acceptable behavior are made salient. Finally, we extend our principal finding through a cross-national analysis of survey data. Our results imply that language may have significant consequences for mass opinion about gender equality.