With specific initiatives and actions the House of Representatives will act to eliminate sexism, said the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Anita Demetriou, after the end of a seminar held on Friday at the Conference Centre on sexism in language.
Asked what she intends to do at the parliamentary and state level to eradicate sexism, Ms. Demetriou replied that the House of Representatives has prioritized issues such as equality, empowerment of women and young people, as well as equal and fair representation and treatment.
In this context, the Speaker said, the initiative for the seminar with media officials was taken "so that through information we can realize that we should not reproduce stereotypes and prejudices that take us much further back. So we all need to improve," he said.
In addition, he said that it is a common and horizontal effort to create a culture of empathy and equal and fair treatment of everyone, "whatever they are, whatever they believe, regardless of their gender, regardless of their beliefs." This is the direction that the House of Representatives will launch with specific initiatives and actions in the immediate future, Demetriou noted.
The seminar on "Sexism in language and guidelines for the use of gender-sensitive language" was organised by the Parliament and the Mediterranean Institute for Social Gender Studies on the occasion of International Women's Day.
The President of the Parliament welcomed the event and focused on the importance of the role that the media has to play in eliminating sexism and stereotypes.
Maria Angeli, representative of the Mediterranean Institute for Gender Studies, who was in charge of the seminar, stressed that language reflects and preserves perceptions and is also a living and changing organism.
During the discussion with the participants, examples of sexist language were heard, such as the verb "to man", the expressions "fire, woman and sea", "the lame Mary", "Caesar's wife", as well as the Cypriot dialect words "andropos" and "adropinos".
In addition, it was noted that at the syntactic level of the Greek language, the masculine type precedes the feminine and the neuter. It was also mentioned that men in power use sexist language to corner women.
The Speaker of the Parliament mentioned during the debate that the laws of the state are written in the masculine gender and revealed that an effort will be made through the Parliament to rewrite the Constitution.
The seminar used examples of sexist discourse drawn from a global study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
It was pointed out that people have many identities and that sexism focuses on specific identities. Some ways of dealing with it at the linguistic level include attempting to use the double gender (e.g. "the student"), using partial neutralization (e.g. "student community" instead of "students", "teachers" instead of "professors") and reversing the gendered imposition in language. An example of the latter mode is the 2018 Research Promotion Foundation (RPI) competition announcement, where the type "female students" was deliberately used instead of "pupils/students."
Furthermore, it was stressed that sexism is not only from men to women, but also exists from women to men and from women to women.
Source: CNA
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