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Gender Bias in Linguistics Textbooks: Has Anything Changed Since Macaulay & Brice 1997?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Abstract
Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, from which we randomly sampled 200 example sentences each. We find that the gender skew and stereotypes reported in 1997 are still present today. Male-gendered arguments are almost twice as frequent as female-gendered ones, and more likely to occur as subjects and agents. In addition, example sentences often perpetuate gender stereotypes. We discuss some broader implications and potential interventions to prevent the implicit perpetuation of gender biases in linguistic materials.
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- Copyright © 2021 Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
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For comments and questions on this work, we would like to thank audiences at the LSA 2018 annual meeting in Salt Lake City, as well as at Brandeis University, MIT, SOAS, the University of Connecticut, the University of Oregon, the University of Toronto, and Yale University. We would additionally like to thank our anonymous Language referees and editors Andries Coetzee and Natasha Warner for their careful feedback on the manuscript. We thank and acknowledge our colleagues Katharine Donelson and Miranda McCarvel, who participated in the early data collection and ideation portions of this work. Special thanks go out to Colleen Brice and especially to Monica Macaulay for her continuous support of this project and her invaluable comments on various stages of the manuscript and work. Finally, we thank COSWL/COGEL for its many years of solidarity and advocacy for gender equity in the field of linguistics.
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