As I’ve been researching the gendered nature of bossy, I’ve gotten a lot of important feedback from fellow linguists, who have helped to strengthen the argument in favor of viewing bossy as a word that is applied to women and girls more than men and boys.

One particularly interesting point was raised by Lesley Jeffries (Professor of English Language at the University of Huddersfield). She commented that “One argument that you didn’t even use is that women are usually less mentioned in corpora than men”. I did not mention this, and if I could have provided evidence of it at the time, it would have impacted how I presented my findings on bossy. Specifically, it would mean that women were called bossy more than men were even though men were given more attention by speakers and writers in the corpus (suggesting bossy is even more gendered than I found originally).

Beyond that though the other implication that is staggering is this: If women are less frequently mentioned in corpora, which attempt to represent (to the best of our ability) language use in some domain, then that would reflect the idea that, we systematically pay less attention to one group of human beings than another. Read more ›