Language, Politics, and Inequality – Gender Perspective

On Wednesday we met in the Municipal Library Fil. 4 to participate in the debate entitled Gender ideology(ies): Man and woman – different by nature, inequal by society? We tried to find the answer to this question with our four guests: sociologists Borys Cymbrowski and Anna Czerner, philologist Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska and biologist Elżbieta Pogoda.

We were aware that for most people the term gender is unfamiliar or even unfriendly, especially when someone is not a philologist or a social researcher, so we started with the basic questions: what gender is, how it exists in our respective  fields of studies, and if there exists gender ideology. We can say that gender in general is about social consequences of being men, women or the others, because in the opinion of Elżbieta Pogoda even from a biological point of view there are more than only two sexes. And there is no evidence that one sex has an advantage over  another.

In Polish media we encounter some false beliefs about the meaning of the word “gender”. But as Borys Cymbrowski mentioned it is a problem of confusion of nature with culture, because in the Polish language we have only one word (płeć) for gender and for sex. So some commentators confuse biological meaning with the cultural one. They accuse gender scholars of promoting a dangerous ideology which tries to convince people to choose their sex. As Anna Czerner said, the truth is that in the social sciences gender was a neutral category to analyse the relations between people in society, but unfortunately  some institutions and politicians took one of the least popular topics in gender studies and used it as a basis to create and apply gender ideology as a political tool.

After that we focused mostly on language aspects within gender issues. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska indicated  that for her it was easier to introduce herself in English than in Polish, because in Polish most names of academic professions have only a masculine  gender, or even if it has a female gender, masculine forms sound more serious and more prestigious. But language is not a constant phenomenon –  it is changing all the time. Twenty years ago we considered some female forms of words as strange, but today we take them for granted. We concluded that it is important to include more women-related forms to language, and it is one of the main catalysts of social changes in the public sphere.

We are really glad we could discuss  it with you and with the citizens of Opole. We would like to thank you all for your presence and participation, and we hope to see you soon during another discussion. The aim of the whole debate was to clarify a little the problem of gender, but two hours is a  short time when you are discussing  such an important and complicated topic – so we treat this meeting only as a start. The debate is still open.