Would a Male Sounding Name for the Covid-19 be Perceived as More Serious than a Female Sounding Name? Impact of the Grammatical Gender Assigned to the Disease on its Perception and on the Protective Measures Taken to Avoid it

At first glance, debates about the gender of the definite article that should precede the term Covid-19 seem to be more about grammatical and linguistic considerations. Nevertheless, following recent work (Farrow et al. [2018]) inviting a closer look at words as levers for influencing human perceptions and behaviours, we experimentally test in France whether the choice of the article to precede the term Covid-19 could have contributed to more effective public policies. The results show that this seemingly innocuous choice is not and suggest that, in the context of a strategy to combat the spread of the virus, the masculine article might have been more relevant.