Why can’t bridges be pretty and strong?

How the gender of nouns in different languages affects how they are perceived.

You might think that common nouns, like buildings, bridges, boats, things that are largely universal in their uses, would be consistent in terms of how they are perceived. It’s not even something you really think about, ‘how you perceive a bridge’, you just do, it just exists. And yet, as it turns out, your subconscious perception of these types of nouns can change depending on the language you speak, and the assigned gender of the noun.

As much as we’re trying dismantle the fabricated social gender norms these days, it becomes even more difficult when even the nouns that make up your everyday language have to be referred to as ‘el’ or ‘la’, in the case of Spanish, or ‘der’ and ‘die’ in German, where even their neuter articles can’t save them fully from this trap.

I’ve never been so thankful for the gender neutral ‘the’. We’re lucky in that sense with English, in some ways gender is less embedded into our language. However, that hasn’t stopped us from linking gender stereotypes with helpless inanimate objects. In fact, there’s a longstanding maritime tradition of referring to boats with female pronouns, ascribing the boat with traditionally female characteristics of beauty and grace, while presumably those in them were strong and heroic male sailors. How did we end up here? Who decided a boat was a woman? Even with the optimistic outlook that stereotypes are changing, what will not change, or at least not fast, is our subconscious perception of these nouns. No level of feminism or ‘wokeness’ can alter this deeply ingrained collective reality.

It is not a new idea that language influences thought and perception, it is in fact thoroughly researched, and is often traced back to the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, but this is by no means the origin of this theory. Sapir specifically claimed that ‘The existence of the various language systems implies that the people who think in these different languages must perceive the world differently.’ [1]

Research has found fascinating differences in how Spanish and German speakers perceive identical objects based solely on their grammatical gender. Take bridges: in German, 'die Brücke' is feminine, while in Spanish, 'el puente' is masculine. When asked to describe bridges, German speakers were more likely to use words like "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine descriptors, while Spanish speakers attributed bridges with qualities of being "sturdy" and "strong" – characteristics we traditionally associate with masculinity. [2]

The same pattern emerges with keys, which flip the gender assignment: key is grammatically masculine in German but feminine in Spanish. Spanish speakers, for whom a bridge is masculine (el puente), are less likely to describe a bridge as "beautiful," and more likely to describe it as "strong," than German speakers, for whom a bridge is feminine (die Brücke).

This isn't conscious bias – it's happening at a subconscious level, where Spanish speakers and German speakers would describe objects with masculine and feminine qualities that corresponded with the object's grammatical gender. The research suggests that even when people aren't actively thinking about gender, the linguistic categorisation influences their mental associations.

What's particularly troubling about this is how it reinforces the very gender stereotypes we're trying to dismantle. The arbitrary assignment of grammatical gender to inanimate objects perpetuates the idea that masculine = strong while feminine = delicate – a false dichotomy that limits how we perceive both objects and, by extension, people.

This linguistic influence runs deeper than we might expect, shaping not just individual perception but collective understanding. It's a reminder that even as we work to challenge explicit gender stereotypes, we're still operating within linguistic frameworks that reinforce these very biases at a subconscious level.

Ready to dive deeper into how language shapes our unconscious biases? Sign up to my Substack for more insights like this into the gender biases woven throughout our everyday communication – because understanding how language can influence thought is a good step towards reclaiming it.

[1] Hussein, Basel Al-Sheikh. "The sapir-whorf hypothesis today." Theory & Practice in Language Studies (TPLS) 2.3 (2012).

[2] Boroditsky, Lera, Lauren A. Schmidt, and Webb Phillips. "Sex, syntax, and semantics." Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought 22.61-79 (2003): 1.