Kheiron Module 3

Use of alternatives for a generic masculine. Use of universal generics or collective nouns: many gender-marked words have their synonyms in collective or universal nouns, e.g. people, family, staff... Use of adjectives, nouns and pronouns in invariant forms. Use of abstract nouns. Use of splitting according to the context: splitting sentence elements such as ‘he and she’, ‘he, she, they’ can be useful in letters, communications, circulars... Changing word order or alternating genders to avoid hierarchies. In a polite way when we write, we put before or prioritise what we want to give importance to, for example, we say ‘you and I’ instead of ‘me and you’. The same happens with grammatical gender markers, and we do this without realising it. Therefore, altering the order in which they are mentioned is a good inclusive communication strategy. Finding a definition of inclusive language (non-sexist or non-exclusionary language) that fits the case at hand, i.e. non-sexist language, is complicated. The UN (n.d.) defines it as the way of expressing oneself orally and in writing without discriminating against a particular sex, social gender or gender identity and without perpetuating gender stereotypes. Since language is one of the key determinants of cultural and social attitudes, using gender-inclusive language is an extremely important way of promoting gender equality and combating gender bias. In order to establish a set of useful strategies for using inclusive communication, we will divide language into three levels: written, spoken and visual. At the level of written language, we find two sub-levels: grammatical and lexical-semantic. In some languages more than in others, at the grammatical level we find an exclusive and wrongly called generic use of the masculine grammatical gender, which is used as a generic. We are going to expose some strategies to avoid an excluding language at grammatical level: Gender Perspective, Diversity and Inclusion in Mentoring 13