Despite their numerical superiority women do not occupy positions of power and authority in the health services generally. This is perceived as being due to a variety of factors which prevent women from realising their full potential as managers. In other parts of the world, as well as in South Africa, middle class white males have dominated health services, since medicine became a formal scien...

Two reaction time experiments were carried out to examine the morphological gender processing of Spanish words that were either transparent -that is, ending in o/a (e.g., banco - bank)-or opaque-that is, without superficial gender marking (e.g., virtud - virtue). In Experiment 1, participants categorized the gender of a transparent gender target preceded by a derived word of the same gender (e....

The use of gender-fair language is an important measure to boost gender equality. However, there is wide-spread scepticism as to the usefulness of avoiding male bias in language, even in gendered languages. For instance, in German all nouns carry grammatical gender, and role names are considered generic, even when their gender is masculine. We used a sentence-picture matching task to test wheth...

This paper aims to explore and discuss how women translators of the Quran have dealt with the patriarchal linguistic elements in the source text by focusing on two main challenges of translation. First the problem of gender agreement differences between the target and the source language. Because Arabic is highly gendered and English is not, many feminine nouns, pronouns and verbs become invisi...

This study examines the relationship between sport participation and perceptions of body size and weight-loss strategies among adolescent girls. Using a sample of 7,214 girls, ages 12–18 years, from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we fi nd that girls who participate in stereotypically feminine sports are more likely to report feeling overweight, attempt to lose weight, and...

This essay examines the complex tangle of emotional and scientific attachments that linked Darwin and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. Analyzing their roles as husbands, fathers, and novel readers demonstrates that possessing and expressing sympathy was as important for Victorian naturalists as it was for Victorian husbands. Sympathy was a scientific skill that Victorian naturalists regarded as n...

Previous research has identified physical and behavioral differences between parents who produce sons and those who produce daughters. However, the possibility that men and women have predictions about the sexes of their offspring based on these differences, or any other interoceptive cues, has not been investigated. We compared the dominance, sociosexual orientation, estradiol, testosterone, a...

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) is a widely used instrument in measuring gender role perception s. Recent concerns regardin g the validity of the adjectives have arisen as changes in the roles of men and wom en have occurred in American society since the 1970’s. A partial replication of the method that Bem (1974) used to validate the masculine and feminine adjectives comprising the instrument...

Gender-fair language (GFL) aims at reducing gender stereotyping and discrimination. Two principle strategies have been employed to make languages gender-fair and to treat women and men symmetrically: neutralization and feminization. Neutralization is achieved, for example, by replacing male-masculine forms (policeman) with gender-unmarked forms (police officer), whereas feminization relies on t...

As if from nowhere, intersexuals are materializing everywhere, and the boundaries separating the masculine and feminine seem harder than ever to define. This change has added another dimension to the debate on how to treat newborns of genital ambiguity. Reprinted from Sciences 40 (Jul/Aug 2000): 18-23. Copyright New York Academy of Sciences