Attitudes toward sexist/nonsexist language in Chinese

Chinese is categorised as a grammatically genderless language because most nouns in Chinese are grammatically, semantically, and referentially gender neutral (Stahlberg et al. 2007). This includes the system of pronouns, where in spoken Mandarin pronouns are not differentiated by gender, although a gender distinction in the third person does exist in written simplified Chinese. It has been pointed out that despite the lack of gender marking in Chinese, this does not necessarily indicate that Chinese is a gender-inclusive language without gender biases and linguistic sexism (Ettner 2002; Moser 1997; Farris 1988). While attitudes toward linguistic sexism and the use of gender-inclusive language have been investigated in English for more than two decades (cf. Sczesny, Moser & Wood 2015;Douglas & Sutton 2014; Parks & Roberton 2000, 2004, 2008), the authors are not aware of any studies addressing this issue in Chinese. The current study adapts Parks and Roberton’s (2000)Inventory of Attitudes Toward Sexist/Nonsexist Language to explore attitudes toward sexist and inclusive language in speakers of Mandarin simplified Chinese (henceforth Chinese) born between 1980 and 2004.The study is based upon a binary gender concept due to insufficient number of non-binary participants.