Take a second and try to talk about a person without mentioning gender.
If English is your native tongue, odds are you failed. But if you had been born in Indonesia, you might have succeeded.
Lera Boroditsky, who studies language and cognition at the University of California, San Diego, recalled a conversation with a colleague from the Southeast Asian country. He was asking her about someone she knew back in the states, and gender didn’t pop up until question 21.
“He didn’t seem to think it was that important,” she said.
In some cultures, maleness and femaleness aren’t the prominent traits they are in the U.S. In yet others, they’re even more salient.
