Does gender play a part in our language changing?

Political correctness has improved over time as people have started to use gender neutral terms where there are gender pairs; for example, policeman is police officer and fireman is firefighters. This allows jobs to be seen more gender neutral rather than it just being a male occupation or a female occupation. Despite language changing in gender pairs it is not the same when it comes to the connotations of certain titles or marked words. Words such as 'spinster' and 'Mistress' have strong semantic derogation. The need for things to become gender neutral seem to be very strong in this generation, people tend to get offended easily and that may be a reason why language is changing.

The search for a gender neutral pronoun started in the 18th century. There have been many attempts to create the perfect gender neutral pronouns but none have agreed on. It would be a massive change to language if one if found that people agree on.

A gender neutral pronoun is a pronoun that is not associated with a particular gender, an exapmle would be 'they'. The probably with 'they' is that it is a plural pronoun, so, when it is used as a singular pronoun it is not grammatically correct. The need for a gender neutral pronoun shows how people are trying to change/improve language so that everyone is comfortable with using the language. Creating a gender neutral pronoun would allow those who do no not like to assume gender, and so write 'he/she', to have a word that doesnt look as untidy.

Zimmerman and West did a study with mixed-sex conversation and they found that men interrupted more than women, this is supportive of the stereotype that men are more dominant which suggests that there was still gender inequality.

There have been many questions on whether men and women speak diffrently, multiple linguists have tried to show the diffrences. For example, Lakoff published assumptions of womens and mens language.