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How are gendered languages holding up in society's current push for gender-neutral terms? This NPR podcast explores gender bias in the Spanish language, the role of the Real Academia Española, and efforts led by teenagers in Argentina to de-gender the Spanish language.

Analyzing the verbs that followed male and female pronouns in 100K stories, the following patterns were observed: 1. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- "she screams", "she cries", or "she pleads." Men tend to be the aggressor: "he kidnaps" or "he beats". Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like "he saves"/"he rescues" are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. 2. There's an old stereotype (that's appeared in works like Game of Thrones and Sherlock Holmes) that "poison is a woman's weapon", and this is supported in our analysis. Female characters are more likely to "poison", "stab", or "kick"; male characters are more likely to "beat", "strangle", or simply "murder" or "kill". Men are moderately more likely to "steal", but much more likely to "rob". 3. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality. David Robinson, the data scientist who ran the text analysis, offers these questions for future research: 1.Is the shift stronger in some formats or genre than another? We could split the works into films, novels, and TV series, and ask whether these gender roles are equally strong in each. 2. Is the shift different between male- and female- created works? 3. Has the difference changed over time? Some examination indicates the vast majority of these plots come from stories written in the last century, and most of them from the last few decades (not surprising since many are movies or television episodes, and since Wikipedia users are more likely to describe contemporary work). 4. I'd also note that we could expand the analysis to include not only pronouns but first names (e.g. not only "she tells", but "M

A new study shows how certain ideas are still deeply ingrained the public's minds as masculine. For example, most of the public associates the president with a man. In fact, the study showed that when articles or people used "her" or feminine pronouns people's reading times increased because of the confusion caused in their brain. Many people don't use "she" when referring to a hypothetical president. The way that language can sometimes gender certain occupations has some important implications. That is why many states and representatives are trying to change the language to make it more inclusive. For example, Kamala Harris, when she was California's attorney general, and changed all the wording of the statutes that referred to the attorney general as a man. This is because gendering occupations can lead to an ingrained bias. However, with more women in politics, biases could change. For example, in UK, where there have been 2 female prime ministers, the study was replicated and it was found that people were comfortable using "she" or "her" when stating the next prospective prime minister.

Just having a feminine voice means you're probably not as capable at your job. At least, studies suggest, that's what many people in the United States think. There's a gender bias in how Americans perceive feminine voices: as insecure, less competent and less trustworthy.