Ce qui se cache derrière un nom de famille: les biais de genre en français

Abstract

This article presents a sentence completion task in French, which allows us to measure speakers’ preferences regarding the interpretation of surnames. The results show the weight of a sociolinguistic factor, namely gender bias, which causes speakers to unconsciously transgress the biases imposed by the two semantic types of verb (subject bias and object bias). The participants use all the mechanisms at their disposal to associate a surname with a male rather than a female individual. This shows the existence of a real bias for the masculine in the use of different structures in a language, and more generally, the link that exists between language and social prejudice. As our study replicates the same results for French as those observed for English, we can put forward the hypothesis that this bias is not specific to one language, but rather a general trend that manifests itself across languages. This study should be continued in other languages to validate our hypothesis.