A study of Sexism terms in the headline news of voa news.com

ABSTRACT

Language as the means of communication plays the crucial role for many people, not only for the share medium but it also holds various functions for human life. Moreover recently, in this modern society in which human being rely much on the media to carry out its function; consequently, the presence of media is very dominant in this life.

As a matter of fact, the media today expose too much the domination of men on women of one which reflected in the language. The sexism in language which differentiates men and women and in turn discriminates women in terms of the language usage gives negative stereotypes on women in the society, such as the appropriate place for woman in the house responsible for the domestic duties, women do not need to get the high education and job career outside the house, and so on. These negative stereotypes create the social of the women’s present in the society.

This research uses descriptive qualitative research because here the researcher wants to get a brief descriptive of the words, the utterances, and the expressions of the language which distinguish men and women or which trivialize women. After classifying the sexist language found, they were presented and analyzed by explaining intensely in terms of the Morphological process, Critical Discourse Analysis process, the reason of using it, and the alternative words which are gender neutral to substitute the sexist languages. The description of the sexist words is correlated with the social realities.

The problems of the study are: What types of sexist terms are written in the headline news of VOA News. Com? and how are sexist terms written in the headline news of VOA News. Com? While, the objectives of the study are: to describe the types of sexist terms written in the headline news of VOA News.com. and to explain the sexist terms written in the headline news of VOA News.com.

For significance of the study, the writer hopes that this study will be useful, theoretically gives some advantages for the future researcher, especially for the students who want to get further information about language and gender, or people who interested in feminist linguistic or feminism. Practically, it will gives the contribution for linguistic field, especially related with Discourse Analysis studies.

The sexist language found in the Headline News of VOA here just classified into the words, in which morphologically identified by Sexism in words using suffixes –man,- woman and -ess in occupational terms and job titles, using man as generic noun, using English pairs of words showing non parallel term between men and women, and using Status Consciousness. In addition, in this research the data of each text taken from the source of data are also analyzed with the Critical Discourse Analysis in order to comprehend the whole meaning of the text.

The researcher concludes that still the gender biases words or expressions are frequently used in mostly our mass media. And it needs more awareness in minimize that phenomena.

The last, the researcher suggests that to make the component of discourse analysis method more complete, so the next researcher can analyze the macrostructure and superstructure element. In addition, for people work in media, hopefully they can be wiser in using their words or expression, so that do not hoist the gender biases or discrimination for certain people.