"A businessman is aggressive; a businesswoman is pushy. A businessman is good on details; she is picky.... He follows through; she doesn't know when to quit. He stands firm; she is hard.... His judgements are her prejudices. He is a man of the world; she's been around. He isn't afraid to say what is on his mind; she is mouthy. He excersises authority diligently; she's power mad. He's closemouthed; she's secretive. He climbed the ladder of success; she slept her way to the top."

From "How to Tell a Businessman from a Businesswoman," Graduate School of management UCLA.

From the first moment a child begins to understand the spoken word, they begin to receive messages about society view of the different sexes.

Language itself can not be deemed good or bad, but it does reflect individual or societal values. The above example displays the way in which language can be used to stereotype gender. Both sexes in the example are behaving in the same way but the language used has separated them, praising the male whilst disparaging the female. In order to explore the differences between males and females regarding language we must look at whether or not

like 'the best man for the job'. She states that this is made objectionable as the women, who were already in the minority, were made to feel even more excluded.

Today we have male nurses and male models but as with the terms 'career girl' or 'lady doctor' they seem to be the exception which proves the rule.

Trask (1995) has pointed out that the utilisation of language differs with gender. For instance, women have more of a tendency to use finer discriminations than men in some areas such as colour terms. Women would be more at ease using the labels 'crimson', 'ecru', or 'beige', than men and men would be found to use the simpler version: "It's blue, not cornflower; what the hell is cornflower" (my dad when looking at paint.) Trask also noted that men have a tendency to drop more expletives into a conversation than women, although some women do swear, especially younger females (just sit in a student common lounge for a while to back this up); which is becoming worringly commonplace.

It is claimed that we can speak of 'unwed mothers' but not 'unwed fathers', of a 'career woman' but not a 'career man' as there has arguably been no stigma for a bachelor to father a child, and men are supposed to have careers. The double standard in our language helps to keep alive the aura of female as being deviant to males.

is simply a feature of grammar. It is unlikely to be an imediment to

Basow shows that a positive sign of change is that in the 1982 edition of 'Roget's Thesaurus', there had been an elimination of sexists words i.e. 'mankind' replaced by 'humankind'

Going back as far as 1867, there was an attempt made in Parliament to give women the vote, although it came to be unsuccessful. Barker and Canning (1995), showed how an article, written by a female contained vocabulary which was literally begging for women to be able to vote. There were words and phrases contained such as 'I beg' and 'if you are gallant enough', (referring to the men in parliament). This letter shows a weak side to women, as they give praise to the men of parliament, and almost lose respect for themselves in the process.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Fromkin Rodman, Barker Canning, Development Origin, Critique Rationality, According Sunderland, Graduate School, Senate Court, According Basow, York Labov's, Brian Ross, barker canning, fromkin rodman, standard forms, sexist language, prestige form, women society, barker canning 1995, feature grammar, males females, class women, male form, begins understand spoken, receive messages society, individual giving offence, giving offence individual,
Approximate Word count = 6142
Approximate Pages = 25 (250 words per page double spaced)