Avoid gender bias in Spanish

Question

I am not a native Spanish speaker, but I tend to read a spanish (mexican) newspaper to practise my Spanish language skills. However, I was reading this article about teachers in which I read the following statement.

El titular de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), Aurelio Nuño Mayer, subrayó que en la evaluación de desempeño se han presentado 132 mil maestros y lo que sigue es capacitación a los docentes como parte de un proceso en el que aseguró ningún maestro perderá su trabajo.

I am assuming that "maestro" is actually used in a gender-neutral way here because they are talking about a group of people, and the male gender of the word might also be used as the 'gender-neutral' way. In my mother tongue we tend to express ourselves in a gender-neutral way whenever applicable, and it coincides often with the 'male' way of saying the word.

Is there a Spanish gender-neutral way to phrase such a sentence? Or is it perfectly acceptable to use 'maestro' when clearly speaking about maestro/maestra. (Assuming that it is not actually a sexist statement, and he only considers male teachers here)

Answer 1

Yes, you are right. Spanish tends to use masculine for "gender neutral" (when a group has individuals of both genders you use masculine. You only use feminine if all members were feminine).

Sometimes you may see other ways of trying to express gender "neutrality", but as we can learn from the Real Academia de la Lengua

Los ciudadanos y las ciudadanas, los niños y las niñas

Este tipo de desdoblamientos son artificiosos e innecesarios desde el punto de vista lingüístico. En los sustantivos que designan seres animados existe la posibilidad del uso genérico del masculino para designar la clase, es decir, a todos los individuos de la especie, sin distinción de sexos: Todos los ciudadanos mayores de edad tienen derecho a voto.

Source: "Real Academia de la Lengua

You actually only use both genders in the sentence if it is relevant in order to remark the gender distinction like "los niños y las niñas tienen las mismas oportunidades".

There are others who try to use the "@" sign (los niñ@s) in some informal context, but "@" is not actually a letter (and sometimes could not even work well, since other words in the sentence may depend on the gender of that one for concordance).

Answer 2

Diego's answer is very good.

In most cases, it's possible to use an epicene noun to stand in for the person (such as persona, miembro, etc, that are always one gender) and then include a collective term for the group. In your example, you could use:

… aseguró que ningún miembro del profesorado perderá su trabajo …

Answer 3

Consider the following phrasing:

El titular de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), Aurelio Nuño Mayer, subrayó que en la evaluación de desempeño se han presentado 132 mil docentes y lo que sigue es su capacitación como parte de un proceso en el que aseguró, nadie perderá su trabajo.

The information presented is mostly the same with some less redundancy. The only obvious flaw I could see in doing this is that on saying "nadie perderá su trabajo" you are being less directly specific as to whom is not going to lose their job, but this information is obvious from the context so I'd consider this to be an accurate gender-neutralization of the sentence. All of it without recurring to any complex vocabulary, doubling gendered nouns or using strange non-alphabetic characters in your sentence.

I feel Diego's answer relies on your particular phrasing of the question as well as a bit of a Straw Man's fallacy to promptly dismiss your quest for gender neutrality. This is why I have taken the liberty of answering the first part of your question only while ignoring the second part. I believe my answer could be useful to anyone who doesn't care about the original text being acceptable in normative Spanish and wanting to know if an alternative gender-neutral phrasing could be possible, also in normative Spanish.

Furthermore, I'd like to urge you to disregard any future subtle or not so subtle implication that gender-neutrality is not possible in Spanish. People saying this actually mean that it's less comfortable for them to think of a gender-neutral way of saying things and so they prefer to rely on the default generic masculine nouns, or they don't know enough Spanish to do so, or maybe they have some political agenda about it.

For more information on avoiding gender bias in Spanish as well as the underlying controversy, you can read Juan Moreno Cabrera's excellent article "Acerca de la discriminación de la mujer y de los lingüistas en la sociedad" about RAE's report on "Sexismo, lingüismo y visibilidad de la mujer".

Edit: I had somehow missed TeachingTom's answer but his phrasing is more polished than mine and an excellent example of gender-neutral use of Spanish.

Answer 4

Yo hubiese escrito esto: «El titular de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), Aurelio Nuño Mayer, subrayó que en la evaluación de desempeño se han presentado 132 mil docentes cuya capacitación es lo que sigue como parte de un proceso en el que aseguró nadie perderá su trabajo».