sex bias and epicenes h . stephen straight is right to mention the importance of the essentially psychological evidence in favor of the idea that epicene he biases perceptions in favor male interpretations . there are considerable number of studies of this effect and a few attempts at interpretation as to how it comes about . essentially , the studies take two tacks . one model involves an interpretation task of some kind in which subjects are induced to provide some form of evidence of male or female interpretation of the referent of some generic epicene . the independent variable was the pronoun coreferent to epicene antecedents in invented sentences presented to subjects . subjects give names to characters , draw pictures , or say directly whether a character is male or female , etc . this type began back in 1970 , with an almost impossible to locate study by kidd . the most famous version was probably martyna 's ( 1978 , 1980 ) work and the latest version i am aware of was an experiment by gastil in 1990 . also , there were experiments by kosrohshahi in 1989 , moulton , robins , & elias in 1978 , and switzer in 1990 . the other type involves production tasks in which subjects selected a coreferential pronoun to complete sentences with antecedents refering generic epicene referents . here the independent variable was the degree of sex-stereotypicality of the generic referent ( e . g . marine vs . teenager vs . nurse ) . this type of study was inaugurated by martyna ( 1978 , 1980 ) . it was also used by gastil . in almost all studies uses of he strongly correlat with male interpretations of the referent . my own naturalistic data shows the same result with referents like ' lumberjack ' and ' particpants in congressional sex scandal ' used more with he than say ' child , ' or ' teacher . ' there are others along both lines , which will be supplied upon request . as for explanations , the most interesting ones for someone ( like me ) who tends to be skeptical of pernicious influences of grammar on other aspects of cognition ( please let 's not start that one again ) are by mcconnell - ginet in a number of articles ( e . g . 1988 ) and moulton back in 1977 . moulton eschews notions of markedness and instead compares it to the kleenex effect whereby the identity of a prestigious subset is assumed by the superordinate category , with the result that people tend to think of the subset as more prototypical . so kleenex are most prototypical paper tissues , sanka is the prototypical decaf coffee ( in the us ) , and so on . note that this involves cognitive interaction with lexical semantics ; there is nothing morphosyntactic going on here . refs : ( i ' ll put full names whenever i remember ; i do n't want to look up all the arts . ) gastil , john ( 1990 ) " generic pronouns and sexist language sex roles , 23 629-643 kidd , v . ( 1970 ) a study of images produced through the use of male pronouns as the generic moments in contemporary rhetoric and communications , 1 25-30 khosroshahi , f ( atima ? ) ( 1989 ) penguins do n't care , but women do language in society , 18 , 505-525 martyna , wendy ( 1978 ) what does he mean ? j . of communication , 28 131-138 . martyna , wendy ( 1980 ) the psychology of the generic masculine in r . borker and n . ferman women and language in literature and society mcconnell - ginet , sally ( 1988 ) language and gender in frederick newmayer linguistics the cambride survey vol . iv moulton , janice ( 1977 ) the myth of the neutral man . in m . vetterling - braggan , j . elliston , & j . english feminism and philosophy moulton , janice , robinson , m . and cheris , e . ( 1978 ) psychology in action : sex bias in language use " american psychologist , 33 , 1032-1036 switzer , j . ( 1990 ) the impact of generic word choices sex roles 22 , 69-82 michael newman dept . of educational theory & practice the ohio state university mnewman @ magnus . acs . ohio-state . edu