The dark side of gendered language: The masculine-generic form as a cause for self-report bias

Language reflects sociocultural structures, such as gender, and affects individuals' perceptions and cognitions. In gendered languages, male-inflected parts of speech are generally used for both sexes (i.e., masculine generics), thus proliferating stereotypes, inequality, and misattributions. We hypothesized that masculine-generic inflection in a questionnaire would bias women's reports compared with a genderneutral inflection (e.g., "he or she"). We tested our prediction using an academic motivation questionnaire. We found that women reported lower task value and intrinsic goal orientation in the masculinegeneric form compared with the gender-neutral form, and lower self-efficacy than men in the masculinegeneric form. These findings suggest that questionnaires and surveys written in gendered languages or translated into them may contain construct-irrelevant variance that may undermine the validity of their scores' interpretations, thus risking the possibility of false conclusions.