At many places, an International Women's Week is being observed from March 8 to March 13 to make a shift in the celebration of the event from usual gimmicks, tokenism, role-reversal show-offs and rituals to some serious effort toward gender equity. One such effort could be in the form of making a shift towards use of gender-neutral language in schools.
Due to thrust on feminism, gender equality and women's empowerment, English has changed towards the using gender-neutral language both in communicative and academic spheres.
For example gendered nouns - man and words ending in '-man' - have been changed with 'person' or 'individual'. However, for various functionaries gender neutral ti the thesaurus for alternatives to gendered nouns can be consulted.
Documents have been created by various organizations and institutions, including the UN, which list gendered nouns and their alternatives so that in communication, a gender neutral environment may be reflected.
Many educators of the view that the schools and institutions of higher education must take a lead in de-masculinize their daily communication to remove the gender bias reflected in the language use. Every school teacher is needed a three-day training in the use of gender neutral language in the school and classrooms.
The textbooks should be reviewed from the gender neutrality viewpoint and their reprints and new editions should changed gender neutral words and pictures.
Read the word cloud as an illustration of a few gender neutral words and create a institution based list gendered nouns in vogue and their alternative gender-neutral nouns to begin with.
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