Stereotype woman in the linguistic consciousness of Russian and Chinese students (based on a pilot experiment)

This article considers the stereotype woman in the linguistic consciousness of Russian and Chinese students. Language is considered to be not only an instrument of cognition, a source of information about a person and society, but also a means of fixing a particular notion of the reality. This makes it possible to explore social stereotypes stored in consciousness, which are characterized by a certain set of reactions connected with the linguistic form. Gender stereotypes are a kind of the social stereotype and closely related to the social role of men and women. Constant ideas of the images and behavior of different sexes are formed and stored in ordinary consciousness of people. These notions express both objective differences between men and women and subjective attitudes to men and women, different expectations and demands from them. These expected standards of masculinity and femininity manifest themselves in gender stereotypes. Different cultures and different ethnic groups create different ideas about a man and a woman, which exist in a person's mind in the form of gender stereotypes. In this article, the authors deal only with the stereotype woman, applying the method of linguistic experiments; the gender stereotype woman (auto-stereotype and hetero-stereotype) is studied in the linguistic consciousness of representatives of different ethnic groups. Based on the experiment results, preliminary conclusions about the gender stereotype woman are drawn. There are some differences and similarities of this stereotype among the Chinese and Russian youth. On the whole, the stereotype woman in the Chinese group is more typical and coherent than in the Russian group.