The End of the 'Masculine Rule'? Gender-Neutral Legislative Drafting in the United Kingdom and Ireland

Abstract

With the burgeoning of the feminist movement in the western world during the latter half of the 20th century, the question of drafting legislative texts according to principles of gender neutrality1 emerged as part of a more general policy which aimed at removing the socio-economic differences resulting from long-standing discrimination against women. Sexist language, based on the premise that the norm of humanity is male, had been used for over 150 years in English-language legislative texts. But by the 1970s, the traditional assumption that he subsumed she—a policy that has been called ‘the masculine rule’2—had started to be widely contested, and calls were made to redress the imbalance. According to Petersson (1998: 103), the masculine rule first appeared in British legislation in 1827, partly thanks to the influence of writers such as Jeremy Bentham who advocated letting ‘the masculine singular comprehend both genders and numbers’ so as to avoid the ‘evil of longwindedness’ (cited in Petersson, 1998: 102).3 This policy ended almost 300 years of using female terms to represent women in legislative texts, a policy which emerged during the Elizabethan period, at least in the field of vagrancy legislation (Petersson, 1998: 96).