Our work

Gender sensitive language in education, the media and legal documents

In our society, the awareness of fighting discrimination on any level is evident, but we do not have institutionally set mechanisms when it comes to fighting discrimination. The condition in language is even harder since there is no awareness of language discrimination nor are there strategies for overcoming this condition.

Examples on language discrimination:

- the usage of masculine gender as generic gender for addressing both men and women: "američki državni sekretar Hillary Clinton"

- addressing women in public according to their marital status: "gospođa ili gospođica"

- the usage of politically incorrect terms: "mentally retarded"

The aim of this project is to support the implementation of the legal provision that “discrimination in language exists when only one grammatical gender is used as generic term” (Changes and additions to the Law on gender equality in BiH, Gazette no. 102/09, 29.12.2009.), primarily in the area of education, the media and legal documents.

By providing guidelines and practical advice for implementing gender sensitive language into students’ books, media and legal discourse, as in revision of office positions and teaching positions, we will offer the beginning incentive for introducing gender sensitive language into other aspects of society.

The Project is divided into two parts.

First part – proofreader training

The immediate benefactors of the project are proofreaders who took part in the training (four workshops and lectures) and committed themselves to using gender sensitive language in their institutions and outside of them. They are also aware of the importance of spreading this idea among other proofreaders in the media, publishing companies and government institutions in order to implement gender sensitive language.

These were the topics of the workshops:

We discussed about "doktorica" and "ministrica" being called that way without sounding degrading or devaluative, and one of the concrete tasks was to solve the problem of sekretar Hillary Clinton. Together we came to the conclusion that we could use either sekretarka or tajnica, irrelevant of the standard.

Apart from the four workshops for the participants divided into six groups, we also held four lectures for a wider audience. These four lectures were held by prominent female lecturers from Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade and Novi Sad who deal with these issues.

The first lecture was held on February 5th, at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies, a partner in the project. Amela Šehović, Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, held a lecture on the topic of Etiquette of addressing women in the contemporary Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian language.

On February 22nd, at the CIPS, Mislava Bertoša, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb held a lecture on the subject of Gender awareness in approaching language between resistance and accepted language changes.

Hana Ćopić, MA, held a lecure on the topic The Otherness in Language. “Applied Art” with a film on the topic of language and power. The lecture was held on February 28th.

All the lectures and workshops were finalized by the lecture of Svenka Savić, Professor Emerita at the University of Novi Sad, who shared with us her enormous experience in fighting for equality of women in the public discourse and language.

Out of the seventy-seven applicants, fifty-two of them received a certificate, those participants who were present at at least four sessions (workshops of lectures).

Second part – Handbook Ways of overcoming discrimination in language

During the workshops we realised that our proofreaders have issues when it comes to the distribution of feminine suffixes (whether it is psihologica, psihološkinja or psihologinja; sekretarica or sekretarka etc), as well as addressing some marginalised society groups. That is why we modified the original plan to print guidelines, and created a handbook with a vocabulary appendix.

In the first part, we made several suggestions on using gender sensitive language in public discourse (coursebooks, media reports and legal documents), recommendations for the usage of politically correct language when it comes to people with disability, LGBTTIQ population and some other groups of citizens. The second part of the handbook is a vocabulary appendix with lists of word in the masculine and feminine forms divided into the three different standards of the BCS language. Thus we wanted to make it easier for the proofreaders to find what they are looking for, but also make it available for other users, who do not know how to form a certain word. Besides, we also attached a bibliography list for everyone who is further interested in these issues.

The authors of the handbook are Jasmina Čaušević and Sandra Zlotrg. We would like to thank all co-workers for their help. Positive reviews were given by ph.D. Amela Šehović and M.A. Đermana Šeta.

One of the conclusions of the project is that this kind of training should be continued not only for proofreaders but for TV announcers, spokespeople, journalists and all those who use standard language in official and public communication.

Handbook in the pdf format in BCS can be downloaded here.

Financial support through  FIGAP program.

Institutional partner of the project Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies at the University of Sarajevo.

Our motto is that language per se is not male centric and discriminatory, but the users make it that way.