Gendered language and gendered violence
Highlights
- Gendered language and intimate partner violence are correlated at country level.
- Speaking a gendered language is linked with acceptance of intimate partner violence.
- The effect of grammatical gender works through a cultural and a cognitive channel.
Abstract
This study establishes the influence of sex-based grammatical gender on gendered violence.
We demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between speaking a gendered language and the incidence of intimate partner violence in a cross-section of countries.
Motivated by this evidence, we conduct an individual-level analysis of the effect of speaking a gendered language on beliefs about the justifiability of intimate partner violence, controlling for a wide variety of individual-level socioeconomic characteristics as well as country, religion, language family and ethnicity fixed effects.
Speaking a gendered language is associated with the belief that intimate partner violence is justifiable.
Our results are consistent with complementarity between the cultural and cognitive effects of language on the attitudes to intimate partner violence.