The Visibility of Masculine and Feminine Languages in Columns

Introduction

The person who exists in social life through language is able to reproduce ideology, and this crossover allows the transfer of culture from generation to generation. The media is definitely an important tool used in communication via language. There are many studies on the media. This research focuses on the language used in the media, especially by male and female columnists. The main topic of this research is to find out how columnists, who are opinion leaders in society, use gender differences in their columns. In the first section, a feminist approach and theoretical information about the media are provided. In the application section, the corpus built, whose details will be given below, is used to examine the data through corpus linguistics, discourse, and content analysis methods.

Sex and Gender

Sex is the term that is used to explain the features of the biological, physiological, and genetic structure of a person. It mainly describes the phenomenon of men and women based on these differences. In this regard, chromosome structure and genitals are the determiners of sex as a biological being. However, "gender" imposes different roles and social responsibilities on men and women, which differ according to cultural, geographic, and social structures. Gender, which is rebuilt by society according to its cultural structure, determines perceptions of sex in that culture. In other words, gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. It varies from society to society and can be changed. While most people are born either male or female, they are taught to behave appropriately according to norms – including how they should interact with others of the same or opposite sex within households, communities and workplaces.

According to Joan Scott, gender is the founding element of social relations based on discernible differences between the sexes, and gender is the main way to make power relations clear. Gender is the main field that directly expresses power; thus, perception shapes the concrete and symbolic organization of social life and perception. The sexual differences between bodies are used to legitimize a number of social relations that are unrelated to sex. Conceptual languages put forward differentiation for signification, and sexual difference is the valid way of showing differentiation (Scott: 2007, p; 38). All phenomena on the basis of socialization are constantly being rebuilt in a way that defines, affirms, or criticizes political power. Simone de Beauvoir emphasizes the social structuring rather than the biological structure of sex with the expression "one is not born as a woman, but rather becomes, a woman" in her book "Second Sex"(De Beauvoir: 2010). People's gender-specific behaviors are shaped by how they are raised. The community they live in determines the gender-based behavior and attitudes of people in their home, school, work, and social life. According to Harding, gender is a natural consequence of gender difference or is an analytical classification of individuals, in which they organize their social activities, rather than a simple social variable attributed to culturally different forms of culture (van Zoonen: 1997). According to Connell, gender is a concept associated with social structures and relationships outside of individual characteristics. Therefore, gender is also a feature of collectivities, institutions and historical processes (Connel: 1998, p.190).

Scott describes gender as a political arena and emphasizes that gender is a perceptual lens through which the meanings of masculine / feminine concepts are taught.

Women can be compassionate, patient, affectionate, gentle, weak, in need of protection, passive, emotional, and so on, not only because of their physical characteristics. In addition, being logical, strong, offensive, warlike, and vulgar is not innate to men. All these adjectives are concepts that are formed by the social structure of the individual and constructed in the social process. The main reason for discrimination against women in society is based on gender rather than biological differences. Gender is an extremely important concept in feminism, and it is a field of discussion that has been used in almost all feminist studies up to the present day.

Waves of Feminism

Feminism is an ideology focused on “woman”, as the word itself is derived from the word feminine. It is built on the fight for equality in political, social, economic, and legal fields. Some have sought to locate the roots of feminism in ancient Greece with Sappho (570 BC), or in the medieval world with Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) or Christine de Pizan (d. 1434). Certainly, Olympe de Gouges (d. 1791), Mary Wollstonecraft (d. 1797), and Jane Austen (d. 1817) are foremothers of the modern women's movement. All these women advocated for the dignity, intelligence, and basic human potential of the female sex. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the efforts for women's equal rights coalesced into a clearly identifiable and self-conscious movement rather than a series of movements (Rampton Marta, 2015).

Wollstonecraft is regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism as she defended equality on the basis of the right to education. In her book ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, which is accepted as the first book written on feminist theory, Mary Wollstonecraft argued that the government should give the same right to education to women as it gave to men, because women are also part of public life.

In 1869, John Stuart Mill published his book “The Subjection of Women”. In this book, Mill says “a sex dominating the other is not a right and is one of the biggest obstacles on developing humanity.” With this statement, he became a mainstay of the egalitarian discourse of liberal feminist theory.

Feminist engagement with the discipline of history has a long, rich, and important pedigree: the nineteenth-century awakening, twentieth-century suffrage renewal, and the second-wave women’s liberation movement in the 1970s (Liddington, 2001). By the late 1990s, feminist actions came to be called the third wave of feminism.

The First Wave of Feminism

The first wave of feminism took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal and socialist politics. The goal of this wave was to open up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage. Liberal feminism is the first type of feminism and is therefore referred to as the first wave of feminism.

Women, who were particularly excluded from the public sphere in social life, could not take part in the definition of citizenship. For this reason, first-wave feminists generally tried to achieve equal rights with men in legal, civil, and political terms, as well as educational opportunities. The most important feature of liberal feminists was their stance toward the institution of the family.

However, liberal feminists argued that an equal division of labor between women and men in the institution of the family should be established, under the influence of American culture. One of the reasons for focusing on women's education was that they could be more successful in fulfilling housework and motherhood responsibilities. They were not against the role of being a parent or a mother in this period. Their struggle was against masculine domination in a masculine-dominated public sphere.

The Second Wave of Feminism

The second wave began in the 1960s and continued into the 1990s. While first-wave feminists struggled to equalize women's rights with men's in the legal and political spheres, second-wave feminists, in addition to questioning traditional feminine roles, also tried to demonstrate racial, class, and gender discrimination in the social sphere. One of the main motivations of the second wave was certainly the book “Second Sex”, written by Simone de Beauvoir. From her book, “one is not born as a woman, but rather becomes, a woman” became the motto of the era. This became the first public argument about gender. The book conveys knowledge and experiences about how gender roles are shaped, reconstructed, and taught by the family and community after birth.

This wave unfolded in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of a variety of minority groups around the world. The New Left was on the rise, and the voice of the second wave was increasingly radical (Rampton Marta, 2015).

The motto ''the personal is political'' was clipped from the words of antiracist activist Anne Braden¹ and adopted by civil rights activists and the New Left at first, then by feminist activists. According to Becky, the idea behind the slogan is that many things that are thought to belong to history are actually deeply political issues, such as abortion, unemployment, birth, death, illness, etc. (Becky, 2002, p. 347).

The appearance of women in the international arena has taken many years and many struggles. In chronological order, the most important studies and initiatives are:

1947: 'The Commission on the Status of Women’ was established within the scope of the UN.

1975: The 'First World Conference on Women' was held in Mexico City. The UN introduced international standards and sanctions to ensure equality between men and women.

1979: The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted. With this convention, discrimination against women was defined from a broader perspective, and national and international targets were set in order to take precautions to eliminate all forms of discrimination.

1993: The World Conference on Human Rights was held in Vienna, and it was a turning point for women's rights. “The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women” was adopted at the Vienna conference, and it is the first human rights document specifically addressing violence against women.

1995: Beijing Platform. The most important articles of the convention are Articles 234 and 235, which refer to two main strategic objectives. The first is to increase the participation and access of women to expression and decision-making in the media and new technologies. The second is to promote a balanced and non-stereotyped portrayal of women in the media.

Recommendations to NGOs include establishing media monitoring groups, using information technology effectively, networking and organizing joint programs between NGOs, women's organizations, and professional media associations, and advocating equality between women and men, especially women's human rights (Turkish Journalists Association, 2016).

The Third Wave of Feminism

The third wave of feminism or “post feminism” arose in the early 1990’s, when a group of young people, calling themselves third-wave feminists, gathered to protest a high court in the United States. The second wave defined itself as the continuation of the first. However, the third wave existed in a completely different area of struggle. The first two waves focused on achieving equality between the sexes. This is because the risk of sexual harassment has no relevance to the race or economic status of the victim. However, under the influence of the postmodern movement, the third wave emphasized differences such as sexual preference, race, economic status, etc.

Postmodernism examines language with a critical approach. Language is a completely transparent tool from the modernist point of view. According to postmodernism, language creates facts.

According to Lyotard, knowledge, “rather than being objective, is the combination of assumptions regulated by language rules” (Lyotard: 1992). Postmodern feminism examines language in order to reveal the male-dominated elements that it contains, using various methods within the scope of grammar, semantics, semiotics, and morphology.

Media as a Language Transmitter

Mass media, with the ability to transfer verbal, written, printed, visual, and audible texts and images of all kinds to large masses, has been differentiated and enriched in terms of form and content with the advancement of technology in recent years. Through the possibilities provided by the Internet, all kinds of content can be transmitted in various forms and people can interact with each other. The media conveys all kinds of messages to the masses with different socio-demographic characteristics, after altering them according to its policy and formatting them according to its publishing system (Mora, 2008, page 6).

The first studies on gender and the media focused on how women were represented in the media. Studies in Turkey also follow this path. These studies put forward that women were represented less than men in the media and that the traditional roles of women were emphasized. Women were described as mothers, wives, and victims of violence. Another field of study is the employment of women in the media. According to these studies, women still face “glass ceiling syndrome” and cannot reach the positions that they deserve in the male-dominated media.

All of these appear in the news production process. Sex becomes an identifier for hard (politics, economy, etc.) and soft (health, life, travel, etc.) news. Hard news is produced by males and soft news is produced by females.

Columnist Authorship

One of the basic principles of journalism is the distinction between news and commentary. News should be objective. However, columns contain personal ideas. Columnists defend the ideologies that they advocate about the events that make up the agenda within the ideology to which they belong (Yağcıoğlu, 2002, p.124). These ideas vary considerably in terms of ideology, depending on the type of newspaper and the point of view (Van Dijk, 1998, p. 21). Interpretations are subjective critical texts containing general thoughts or everyday events and cannot be criticized (Tokgöz, 2000, p. 40).

Compared to print versions of newspapers, the Internet has allowed more space for columnists. This leads to an increase both in the number of columnists writing on a regular basis and in the diversity of topics. Columns have an influence on shaping public opinion. In addition, the possibility of sharing a column with a single click on social media has made a dramatic contribution to the number of reads. The ideas put forth by columnists in different fields, from sports to politics and economics to foreign policy, are so influential that they can draw the boundaries of controversy in that field.

Masculine and Feminine Language

The shaping and mutual sharing of people's thoughts in mental processes and the emergence of new ideas and ideologies through these exchanges are made possible through linguistic communication. This leads to socialization and linguistic interaction. “Language” is a tool that allows individuals to express emotions, thoughts and knowledge, and to communicate with each other. Language, which provides communication between people, is a precursor to social life, and the intermediary and carrier of knowledge, skills and values (Sencer: 1982, p. 3-5). According to Erol, if the cultural structure of a society needs to be understood, language should be observed as it contains many clues about the culture (Erol, 2014, p. 211).

The languages developed by different groups and sections within the social structure differ from each other. However, the dominant language is the language of authority. Social structures are understood by analyzing this dominant language and discourse. The existence of sexist discourse that humiliates women and the female body is evidence of the existence of gender relations in a culture dominated by men (Hodge, 1988, p. 5).

The theory of "domination", which was discussed by the second wave of feminism, has focused on the fundamental differences between masculine and feminine language. The pioneering work in feminist language studies is Robin Lakoff's "Language and the Women's Place" (1975), which marked the debate on gender and language.

Method and Importance of the Study

This study examines masculine and feminine reflections in language with regard to gender. The data used are based on columns in the Turkish media, which play a crucial role in affecting society with regard to the reproduction of ideology.

The TS Columns Corpus² is composed of 25.915 columns collected from online newspapers (Cumhuriyet, Radikal, T24) and their various authors. The data was collected by using Scrapy, a web crawler coded in the Python programming language. The number of columns from female authors is 12.958 and from male authors is 12.957. The data covers a 12-year period from 2006 to 2017, and the corpus contains 18.164.832 tokens.

The size of the data and the number of authors involved in the corpus places the study in a different position from previous studies on Turkish. Among the data crawled, we made a selection. The accuracy of the crawled webpages was the first criterion. This also led us to limit the sources to three websites. We also discarded many columns in order to equalize the distribution between female and male authors. For each year, the number of columns added to the corpus database was equal.

• Three sub-corpora were created for this study: • A corpus of female authors covering 2014 and 2015 • A corpus of male authors covering 2014 and 2015 • A corpus of both male and female authors covering 2014 and 2015

The two sub-corpora contain 4.991 columns each, and the third contains 9.982 columns in total. The female sub-corpus contains 4.042.952 words and the male sub-corpus contains 3.483.699 words.

The distribution of the data across sources is as follows:

Table 1. The distribution of subcorpora according to sources and year.

The corpus is based on CQPWeb and CWB. We take advantage of CQPWeb to run queries with morphological annotations and part-of-speech tags, and to create frequency and collocation lists for each corpus.

The corpus also allows the categorization of results, which we used for the manual discourse and semantic analysis of the results.

Findings

The corpus interface allows us to generate frequency lists for each sub-corpus and compare them. We used this function in order to identify words with significantly different frequencies. The comparison of these “positive” and “negative” lists of words showed that female authors have more columns about life, travel, children, health, horoscopes, and art. When the same lists were generated for male authors, politics, economy, and sport were observed to be the main topics of the columns. We used 7 different keywords specific to these categories. Table X presents the results we obtained.

Table 2. The distribution of the words.

The words child, baby, love, and disabled refer to gender roles imputed to women, such as motherhood and sensitivity, and are clearly more frequent in female authors’ columns. The frequency of otel and kalori is an indicator that female authors write more in the health and travel domains.

We should underline that we used the lemma query option provided by the corpus. A lemma query is generated by entering the root word in curly brackets. For instance, the query key {burun}³ will fetch every occurrence of the given word, even if a sound change (drop, assimilation, etc.) is observed. This means that every occurrence of the word in any form is counted.

These results we obtained from our corpus are almost identical to the measurements published by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) at five-year intervals, given in the table below.

Table 3. The distribution of % Stories Reported By Major Topic. Newspaper, radio, television (GMMP 2015: p. 25)

With the query keys “* adamı” and “* kadını”, the results obtained from the corpus reveal the discrimination in the social representation of gender.

Bilim adamı (50) (scientist), devlet adamı (49) (statesman), siyaset adamı (31) (politician), din adamı (42) (man of the cloth) and iş adamı (27) (businessman) are phrases significantly frequent for men, whereas ev kadını (14) (housewife) and Türk kadını (12) (Turkish woman) are on the other side. Both bilim kadını (scientist) and iş kadını (businesswoman) were observed only nine times.

However, when we took advantage of the categorization feature of the corpus and categorized the hits, we found that among the 50 observations of the phrase “bilim adamı”, 20 actually covered both men and women. This is an indication of the presence of masculine language used in columns.

The use of the word “bayan” (lady/dame) instead of “kadın” (woman) in Turkish is the most criticized usage in gender and feminist studies. This is because the word “bayan” refers not only to sex, but is also used as a form of address. Therefore, when referring to sex, the word “woman” should be preferred. When the way that the columnists used the word “bayan” is examined, it is observed that this word occurred 138 times (female authors: 65, male: 73) and the word “kadın” was observed 9950 times (female authors: 7767, male: 2183).

Yet, the sample sentences below show that the criticized usage still persists.

1.a …bayanlar voleybol takımı (Women Volleyball Team)

1.b …bayanlar türbanlarını çıkarıp bikini giyecek. (Ladies will take off their hijab and wear bikinis)

Samples 1.a and 1.b are examples of the negative and criticized usage of this word.

We also found that a female author used this word ironically.

2.a ...çünkü kızlar (bayanlar) zayıf ve muhtaç yaratıklardır.

The corpus we used has part-of-speech tagging and morphological annotations. This allowed us to generate queries based on morphological affixes. We used two personal endings, the first singular and first plural markers, to generate query keys.

For each marker, we first ran a query examining the occurrences of these markers and checked the distribution among female and male authors. The query key [Morph=".*\+A1sg\.*" & PosTag="Verb"]⁴ returned 107,150 matches in 18,470 different texts in the whole corpus. In our sub-corpus, the same query returned 42.209 matches in 7.418 texts, of which 16.317 are by male and 25.892 are by female authors.

The query key [Morph=".*\+A1pl\.*" & PosTag="Verb"]⁵ returned 78.711 matches in 20.002 different texts. In our subcorpus, the same query returned 33.121 matches in 7.991 texts, of which 14.870 are by male and 18.251 are by female authors.

Then we observed 4 different verbs, sevmek (to love), korkmak (to be afraid), kızmak (to be angry) and ağlamak (to cry), with these markers.

These differences in the occurrences of both first singular and first plural endings for these verbs are significant. Female authors used these words at least twice as often with the first person singular.

Table 4. Queries for first person singular marker

Table 5. Queries for first person plural marker

It is obvious that female authors used these verbs by involving themselves in the context more than male authors did. These results show that female authors are more relaxed about representing their feelings than males.

Lakoff (1973) states that certainty is a feature of masculine language. Furthermore, he makes a comparison between masculine and feminine language and claims that women use uncertain utterances and probability more than men. We checked his ideas by running queries using the morphological features that add certainty to a verb in Turkish: copula and necessity markers.

Table 6. Queries for copula and necessity markers

The table above (Table 6) is consistent with his ideas. Certainty is observed more in masculine language.

However, the tables below show that men express possibility more than women. But we should keep in mind that Lakoff’s study is based on spoken language, not written.

Table 7. Queries for possibility

The adverbs belki (maybe) and galiba (I guess), which refer to possibility, are used more by male authors compared to female authors, but again there is no clear gap.

Table 8. Queries for adverbs referring possibility

Another interesting point is that women try to prove their ideas by giving examples. In order to test this idea, we ran queries to find out the frequency of the words mesela (for example), örneğin (for instance), and misal (exemplar). The table below (Table 9) shows the occurrences.

Table 9. Queries for mesela, örneğin and misal keywords

Results

The language used in the columns represents the authors' and the newspaper's ideology. According to the findings gained from the research, the language use of the columnists within the scope of gender was analyzed using corpus linguistics methods, and the results are listed below.

The very first result of this study is the corpus we built. This corpus allows running queries that are not possible to run manually, due to the size of the data and the annotation and tagging it provides. Furthermore, unlike in other studies, this dataset and corpus are publicly and freely available to scholars and researchers.

Most academic studies in this field in Turkey have focused on the representation of women in the Turkish media. The distinctive point of this study is that it conducts research where women are also the producers of the language, or, in other words, the subjects of the data.

We rely on the columns as our dataset, which reproduce the ideology.

We ran our queries from the perspective of gender.

We generated frequency lists for male and female authors. Using the positive and negative words and frequencies, we found the diversifying categories. The gender roles generally attributed to women, such as motherhood, sensitivity, and emotionality, appeared in the columns. Likewise, the keywords iktidar (political power) and spor (sports) were observed more frequently in the columns of male authors, as expected. This means that content and news produced by the media are still transmitting traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

A criticized usage in gender studies is the use of the word adam (man), as mentioned above. The phrase “bilim adamı⁶” was used 65 times by female and 48 times by male authors. However, the phrase “bilim insanı”, which represents gender equality, was used 147 times by female and 104 times by male authors. As columns are language transmitters, we may say that this usage contributes to awareness of gender equality.

Samples taken from the corpus show that stereotypical word choices are still active in the authors’ minds.

The following sample taken from the corpus is from a male author:

“…Tükiye’nin en önemli iş insanlarını, devlet adamlarını ve akademisyenlerini….

“…The most important business people, statemen and academics in Turkey…”

And the sample below is taken from a female author.

“…siyasetçi, entellektüel ve iş insanlarını ağırlayan bir turizmci.”

“…the tourism professional who hosts politicians, intellectuals and business people…”

Females are more sensitive to word choices than males. Even though the male author used iş insanı instead of iş adamı, he is still not aware that the phrase devlet adamı is in the same category that is criticized. Many more samples can be retrieved from the corpus.

This is the first corpus released in Turkish that fetches data from columns and provides the data with part-of-speech tags, morphological annotation and search criteria. This feature allowed us to run queries using morphological units with specific verbs. We believe that, with this corpus, we have provided a tool and a dataset that will help conduct various studies.

And finally, despite all those studies, activist movements and campaigns trying to raise awareness about gender equality, the idealized media is still out of reach.

References