Feminine Pronouns: Is The Golden Age Of The Male Pronoun Ending?
The Associated Press | By Hillel Italie Posted: 08/09/2012 7:21 am Updated: 08/09/2012 11:23 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/08/09/study-tracks-feminine-pronouns-_n_1759344.htmlThe golden age of the male pronoun was ending.
According to a study released Thursday, the "he-she" gap in books — one that has always favoured the masculine — has dramatically narrowed since the release of Friedan's feminist classic.
Drawing upon nearly 1.2 million texts in the Google Books archive, three university researchers tracked gender pronouns from 1900 to 2008. The ratio of male to female pronouns was roughly 3.5:1 until 1950, when the gap began to widen as more women stayed home after World War II, and peaked at around 4.5:1 in the mid-1960s. The ratio had shrunk to 3:1 by 1975, and less than 2:1 by 2005.
"These trends in language quantify one of the largest, and most rapid, cultural changes ever observed: The incredible increase in women's status since the late 1960s in the U.S.," Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of "Generation Me," said in a statement.
