Wirkung gendersensibler Ansprachen in Anmoderationen bei Erwachsenen und Heranwachsenden

Zusammenfassung

Die aktuelle Debatte über den Einsatz geschlechtergerechter Sprache in (Medien‑)Texten aufgreifend, untersucht dieser Beitrag die Wahrnehmung und Wirkung von gendersensiblen Ansprachen in audiovisuellen journalistischen Medienumgebungen. Der Aufsatz greift dabei auf Befunde aus der Kommunikationswissenschaft und Genderlinguistik zur Wirkung von gendersensibler Sprache im Hinblick auf Verständlichkeit und wahrgenommene Geschlechterrepräsentation zurück. Er erweitert diesen Forschungstand um die Analyse gesprochener Sprache im Journalismus. Zudem betrachtet die vorliegende Studie sowohl Erwachsene als auch Heranwachsende als Rezipierende. In empirischer Hinsicht werden zwei Online-Experimentalstudien vorgestellt, die jeweils auf audio-(visuelle) Stimuli bei der Anmoderation von Nachrichtenbeiträgen zurückgreifen. Die Manipulation erfolgte bei jeweils drei Formen gendersensibler Personenbezeichnungen, der Doppelnennung, der Gender_Gap-Sprechweise und der Neutralisierung, sowie beim generischen Maskulinum. Die Untersuchung schließt N = 770 Erwachsene und N = 142 Heranwachsende ein. Zentraler Befund beider Studien ist, dass einzig die Gender_Gap-Sprechweise als signifikant schlechter verständlich bewertet wird. Gleichzeitig führt diese Ansprache zu einem signifikant höher geschätzten Anteil an Frauen in den Beiträgen.

Abstract

This article contributes to the current debate on the use of gender-fair language. Gender has developed into a disputed political issue in Western democracies and the use of gender fair language is one issue of concern, with conservative politicians often advocating to ban its usage from public discourse. In this study, we focus on the use of gender-fair language in media texts, particularly in audiovisual news. The paper draws on findings from communication studies and gender linguistics on the effect of gender-fair language in terms of comprehensibility and perceived gender representation. A peculiarity of the German language (and other languages, such as French) in contrast to English is the use of the grammatical form of generic masculinity to denote the plural of groups of persons. This use of the generic masculine form has come under criticism from feminist scholars and gender linguistics arguing that it reduces the visibility of female and non-binary persons. Therefore, advocates of gender-fair language use argue for new forms of address that include women but also non-binary persons. Some alternatives, such as double naming e.g., addressing both male and female representatives, or neutralization, e.g., gender-unmarked forms, have already been investigated by research both in communication as well as gender linguistics. Newer forms include the so-called gender_gap (marked in written form with a _, * or :). Research has demonstrated that gender-fair forms can lead to a higher perceived representation of women without reducing comprehensibility, once people become accustomed to them.

Even though the state of research is solid with respect to written text, little research has been devoted to media text nor, to our understanding, to spoken language within journalistic formats. At the same time, we witness a growing sensitivity to the use of gender-fair language among TV and radio presenters, both in programming for adults and on public service children’s TV. Criticism against gender-fair language often comes from older persons and it appears that younger media users are more accepting towards (and perhaps accustomed to) gender-fair language. This has led public service broadcasters to open the way for gender-fair language in children’s news.

Therefore, in this study, we expand the current state of research by focusing on spoken language as part of short announcements in TV (or radio) news. In a second step, we interrogate if effects we find within the adult population relate to effects found among younger audiences. From an empirical point of view, we conducted two online experimental studies each of which used audio (visual) stimuli in the introduction to a TV news report. In each case, the script was manipulated to use either generic masculine formulations or one of three forms of gender-fair formulations. The following gender-fair formulations were used: Double naming, gender_gap (spoken with a pause between the male occupation title and its female ending), and neutralization. The stimuli were produced by real (male) news presenters from public service broadcasters. As stimulus material, we used announcements referring to population groups which varied in terms of their typical gender balance: (a) police (a greater proportion of males), nurses (a greater proportion of females) and schoolkids (an even gender distribution).

770 adults and 142 adolescents took part in the two online surveys. The results show that, in line with existing studies on written language, the use of gender-fair language only minimally impacts comprehensibility, at least in the short introductions studied. For two of the gender-fair formulations (double naming and neutralization), we did not find evidence of any significant reduction in comprehensibility compared with the generic masculine formulation, neither for adolescents nor adults. However, the gender_gap version was found to be significantly less comprehensible by both groups. Overall, the comprehensibility of all announcements was rather high, even for the children’s sample and patterns between children and adults did not differ substantially.

Meanwhile, with one exception (neutralization, nurses) neither neutralization nor double naming led to significantly higher estimations of the proportion of females within the following news pieces compared to the generic masculine form. Only the gender_gap formulation led to such higher estimations. Meanwhile, in all conditions, participants were sensitive to the actual gender distributions of each population group, i.e. they estimated higher proportions of men among the police, and higher proportions of women amongst nursed.

Discussing our findings, we argue effects of comprehensibility of gender-fair language are most likely due to habituation of word-usage. Children did not react negatively to forms of gender-fair language and anecdotal evidence from the adult sample shows that it is only the gender_gap version that resulted in emotionally charged negative reactions. Yet, at the same time differences between the generic masculine and gender_gap forms in terms of comprehensibility, albeit significant, are rather small.

One limitation of our studies is that we were only able to focus on the representation of male vs. female group members. We did not account for non-binary persons both in our announcements as well as in our samples. Future research is required to further open the ground for this issue. We encourage researchers within our field to further investigate effects of gender-fair language in (news) media.

Anhang

Tab. 5 Anmoderationen Erwachsenen-Studie