Personal pronouns appear to indicate who or what acts in the world by standing in for people and things: ‘she kicked the ball’, ‘he cooked dinner’, ‘it sank’, ‘they got married’. Personal pronouns sometimes, but not always, include the ‘gender’ of the person or object involved. This chapter will analyse what it means to talk of language as ‘gendered’, and the implications this has for thinking, and living, in the world.

It has become generally accepted within sociology and social theory that it is possible to make a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. The term ‘sex’ refers to the biological or anatomical characteristics of individual humans, usually in terms of their reproductive organs or capacity to procreate. In this sense, ‘sex’ becomes shorthand for the ‘sexual difference’ between men and women. This realm is in the purview of science, especially medical science, which seeks to demarcate the biological characteristics of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Social and cultural scientists, on the other hand, have tended to deal with what they refer to as ‘gender’. Anthropologists such as Mead (1949) have described the divergent ways in which different societies or cultures have treated those individuals whom they deem to be ‘men’ or ‘women’. Feminists have used ‘sex’ and gender to drive a conceptual wedge between the biological and the societal approaches, for example by pointing to the important distinction to be made between two sets of adjectives: ‘male’ and ‘female’ and ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. These pairs invoke, respectively, the realms of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. In this argument, it is maintained that variances in attitudes and expectations with regard to gender are not caused by biological factors. If this were the case, there would be no differences between societies and cultures in how they think and act towards men and women, as the same cause would always have the same or similar effect. Also, understandings of what constitutes appropriate gender roles would not have changed over time, if gender were not related to society rather than biology.