Do Languages with Grammatical Gender Promote Sexist Attitudes?

Both French and Spanish have masculine v. feminine grammatical gender, while English does not have grammatical gender. For example, the phrase ’the table’ in English has the gender-neutral ’the’ preceding the word ’table’, while in French and Spanish, the feminine article ’la’ precedes both ‘mesa’ in Spanish and ’table’ in French . . . These grammatical differences between the languages led me to wonder whether there is a difference in [gender] attitudes among countries were Spanish, French, and English are predominantly spoken (Spain, France, US).

• Linguistics
• Social Science