Ladies First? Not So Fast: Linguistic Sexism in Peer-Reviewed Research

The words we use reflect and influence our interpretation of the world. The role of gender within a language varies; biases based on social gender are referred to as linguistic sexism. Male firstness is the practice of persistently ordering masculine terms before feminine terms. Because academic writing is mandated to be free of bias, peer-reviewed research should not contain any form of linguistic sexism. To assess the presence of male firstness in academic writing, we examined 862 contemporary articles from 10 social science journals across three disciplines: sexuality, health, and psychology. To assess male firstness, we tallied common gendered pairs (e.g., "women and men"; "male and female") and calculated percentages indicating how often men were presented before women. We found that male firstness bias was present in each of the 10 journals. For individual journals, the percentage of gendered phrases that presented masculine terms first ranged from 57.7% to 88.8%. Sexuality and health journals demonstrated less linguistic sexism than psychology; however, there were no consistent trends between journals within each discipline. We discuss the current presence of male firstness in academic journals and the issues this bias triggers. Recommendations for reducing linguistic sexism in peer-reviewed research are also discussed.