One of the elements of words that have a built-in judgment is gender. For example, people "know" that John is a boy's name and that Jennifer is a girl's name. People have gender assumptions not only with names but also with colors. Many boys say "I'm not gonna wear a pink shirt because pink is a girl color."
People tend to categorize colors and names by genders; and this is true worldwidely. Few days ago, I was online searching through web sites, and I found this interesting Korean web site that gave interesting statistics about names. I typed in my Korean name just for fun and I found out that my name was more popular as a boy's name. It also gave me the percentage of how popular my name was, and it concluded the genders of the characters of my name. My Korean name is Ji Hwan and the web site told me that Ji was a feminine character, and that Hwan was an extremely masculine character.
I wasn't surprised by this because I've grown up with people's comments about how I have a boy's name. The worst thing was in 3rd grade, there was a boy who had the same name as me and even the teacher forced me to be partners with him for almost all activities. In elementary school, my friends made fun of my name but looking back, I was surprised by how younger children are more affected by the word with built in judgments. My friends eventually stopped making fun of my name as they got older and they also stopped caring about the "girliness" of colors.
I also thought about what decides the genders of colors and names, and I could only think of one thing. The set standards. Both names and colors have been in existance for a long time and I don't know exactly when, but I could assume that the gender assumption was made a long time ago, too. Because people have been believing the gender assumption for such a long time, they accepted the assumption as a fact. Maybe young children decided the genders of colors by watching Power Rangers since the Pink Ranger and the Yellow Ranger were the females.
Any ideas?
-Joanne Park
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The gender association goes beyond just names and colors. Actually, language can be quite sexist. Why do we always say mailman even if it's a woman? Or we talk about mankind and man wehn referring to the human race as a whole. In wordsmith I remember him talking about how language is unfair to left handed people. The word sinister which means evil in English means left in latin. Words gain connotations with the ideas and thoughts people place in them. Society for several hundred years was very sexist so we talk about the mailman instead of mailwoman. Pink must have been more commonly worn by girls so the connotation developed.
ReplyDelete~Becca LaRosa