How Language Holds Us Back

“Have you ever noticed how often women get called girls?”

One simple question over coffee, and my friend Sarah completely shattered my world.

Defining “adult” can be difficult – legally, you’re an adult at 18, you can drink at 21, you might finally start to feel like a “real adult” after 25 or somewhere in between. I’m 20, and my definition of adult changes pretty much every day. Some days I feel like a true grown up – I have my shit together, so to speak. Other days, I call my mom and cry about how difficult my day was and feel like a child again.

The gendered words we use to describe each other correspond to life stages. Girls and boys are young. Women and men are adults.

So why are women, adults in the eyes of the law and, as administrators often remind us, BU, referred to as girls in the classroom almost every day?

There’s a less age-correlated term for males – guys. It doesn’t imply age or status. But there’s no term like that for women.

So women, especially in the classroom, are labeled as girls.

It seems so simple and arbitrary – it’s just a language choice, after all. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize the sexist implications it may have.

Referring to women as girls can feel like a subtle way to chip away at a woman’s authority and status. I don’t associate “girl” with power, respect, or authority. Calling the women in a class “girls” can feel like a reminder that we’re taken less seriously, especially in mixed gender contexts.

Granted, this sounds a little extreme. Is every professor that uses girls instead of women sexist? Probably not. Is the society and culture that created the linguistic system that has a limited number of words to describe females sexist? Absolutely.

Maybe what I’m getting with this example is that there are so many small, subtle sexist behaviors infiltrating our lives, we don’t even recognize some of them. Hell, I didn’t even recognize this until someone else pointed it out to me.

But once she did the glass was shattered and every time I’m referred to as a “girl,” or my female peers are referred to as “girls,” I cringe a little bit. It annoys me that even our language is coated in a slimy layer of sexism, so thin sometimes that we hardly even notice it.

And because we don’t notice it, the habit becomes harder to break. Calling my peers “women” can sometimes feel weird, unnatural even. We’ve been conditioned to accept the label “girls” until after college, or maybe after we get a job, or after we get married. It’s hard to pinpoint when the shift occurs.

But we are women. We are intelligent, powerful, respectable figures who deserve linguistic syntax that reflects that.

As my guiding light Leslie Knope once said “I am a goddess, a glorious female warrior. Queen of all that I survey. Enemies of fairness and equality, hear my womanly roar.”

_{feature photo credit: AnonMoos, toa267 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons}

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