The World Health Organization recommends feeding children human milk for the first six months after birth due to its known efficacy in ensuring a child's health and survival. This is a major development indicator as it can be linked to reduced parent and infant mortality rates, improved immunity to a number of diseases, higher literacy rates, and extended life expectancy (United Nations, 2021). The WHO's research is intended to educate a broad audience of caregivers, whose identity must be understood in order for them to be reached (World Health Organization, 2019). By analysing the WHO's three factsheets published in English on the topic of 'breastfeeding' (World Health Organization, 2020; 2021a; 2021b), this research aims to answer two questions: In the WHO's description of feeding infants and young children, to what extent does the language assign gender to the caregiver? And, if gender is assigned to the caregiver, which features of the written language and images make this visible? The study was carried out using a mixed methods approach, where the text was first searched for markers of gender (Zaltzman, 2021) in terms of their frequency and most common collocations (app.sketchengine.eu). Both positive and negative search results were then analysed, modelling van Dijk's discourse-cognition-society triangle (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). Findings suggest the presence of both an assumption of cis-femininity in caregivers who breastfeed and a paradigm of binary cis-heteronormativity that is representative of broader societal structures and their influences on cognition. Lexicological and collocational evidence of this is seen in most notably in the inclusion of feminine markers as well as the exclusion of their masculine and gender-neutral counterparts. This study problematises the issue of inclusivity in language but was limited in the scope of what could be achieved with the data collected. Future research may be able to reveal possible ways in which the language might be adjusted to improve inclusivity of all gender identities.
United Nations. (2021). Human Development Report 2020. United Nations Development Programme.
Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2001). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. SAGE Publications.
World Health Organization. (2019, November 11). Breastfeeding. https://www.who.int/health-topics/breastfeeding#tab=tab_1
World Health Organization. (2020, September 19). Newborns: improving survival and well-being. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/newborns-reducing-mortality
World Health Organization. (2021a, June 9). Malnutrition. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malnutrition
World Health Organization. (2021b, June 9). Infant and young child feeding. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/infant-and-young-child-feeding
Zaltzman, H. (2021, November 15). Allusionist 145 Parents transcript. The Allusionist. https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/parents
