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Sketchpad Series

A Research Proposal: Gender-associated English Adjectives and Their Influence on Readers’ Assumptions about Genders in Non-indicative Contexts

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yiran Jiang¹ (yiran.jiang.26@dartmouth.edu); ¹Dartmouth College

The purpose of this tentative research is to investigate how gender-associated adjectives (masculine, feminine, gender-nonconforming, non-binary) influence readers' assumptions about the gender of an unspecified subject in non-indicative contexts. Participants will be asked to indicate the gender of the subject after reading a given text containing these gender-associated, sometimes stereotypical and negatively connotated, adjectives. During the first part of the experiment, 50 English adjectives will be evaluated by a group of participants on a chart of gender temperament (inclusive of femininity to masculinity), which will be represented as a combination of a numerical number corresponding to the assumed closest gender temperament and an alphabetical letter showing the intensity of that selected quality. In the second part of the experiment, 50 prompts each containing the 50 adjectives will be shown to a different group of participants, who will be asked to identify the gender of the unspecified subject in the prompt. My hypothesis is that gender-associated adjectives in English will influence readers’ assumptions about genders in non-indicative prompts, given that these gender-associated adjectives are linked to socially constructed representations of expected gender performance and characteristics. I will run a regression and Chi-square test (dependent variable being nominal) on STATA and see whether the correlation between femininity-masculinity and gender assumptions will be statistically significant. This research will help elucidate whether humans make internal judgments of genders based on pragmatic connotations.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic