Reflection Paper: Kleinman’s Why Sexist Language Matters

Summary and Reflection of Kleinman’s Why Sexist Language Matters

Kleinman in the article Why Sexist Language Matters talks about how people use male names when referring to both men and women. She puts out the negatives of using the male names to apply to both men and women. Some of the names she talks about include freshmen, chairman, guys, and others. I the article, Kleinman puts her point across by giving the various example to support her argument. One of the cases is using the race to identify an individual like “freshwhite,” “chairwhite” and others. Kleinman proposes that with no proper reference to women as a being on their own, it will never be possible to achieve the gender equality every woman is looking for both in roles at the workplace and even wages received. She concludes the article by proposing proper names to be used to refer to women and men and avoid making women sound like subset for the men. The names are like first-years to refer to freshmen, humankind to refer to mankind, “you all” to replace “you guys” and many others.

The entire article is based on gender and how to attain a balance between men and women. It is quite clear that, as much as we fight the gender imbalance, we forget about the little details in language that are part of the more significant problem which is gender imbalance. The article opens a new view of the gender disparity and puts it into perspective. Through a change of language used to refer to women, the society could be able to move a step closer to attaining a balance between man and women by giving each the recognition they deserve and not making one superior.