摘  要

谚语反映一个国家的社会风俗和文化观念，由于人类文化中包含着性别歧视，因而英汉谚语中也存在性别歧视的成分。从社会及家庭地位、性格弱点、传统要求等三个方面介绍英汉谚语中的性别歧视并从历史背景、宗教文化和社会分工角度探讨其产生的根源。
语言与性别的关系是社会语言学的一个重要研究方向，其中性别歧视已成为英语以及其他语言中存在的一个普遍的社会现象，它体现了存在于整个社会中的人们的性别歧视概念，反映出女性较之男性的劣等性。本文就其现象、产生的原因以及新的发展进行探讨。

关键词：谚语；性别；歧视

Abstract

The proverb reflects a country's social customs and cultural concepts. As human culture contains gender discrimination, and thus there is gender discrimination in English and Chinese proverbs. Gender discrimination in English and Chinese proverbs can be seen in three aspects: social and family status, character, and traditional requirements. The author endeavors to explore its causes in three perspectives: the historical background, religious culture, and the social division of labor.
The relationship between language and gender is an important research direction of sociolinguistics. The gender discrimination has become a common social phenomenon in English and other languages. It embodies the concept of gender discrimination in the whole society, reflecting the inferiority of female to male. This paper probes into the phenomenon, its causes and new development.

Key words: proverbs; gender; discrimination

1  Introduction
1.1 The objectives of this study
Sexism is a hot and serious topic in human society. Since the 17th century, women’s movements broke out, and women’s social status is improved, and now people pay more attention to women.
With the improvement of women’s social status, people, especially scholars, at home and abroad, are trying their best to explore the main reasons for sexism in language and effective ways to eliminate it, and then we will gain grand achievements in this field. As we know, the study of this topic made by Chinese is less than in the west. Since 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was founded, the improvement of women’s social status forced scholars in China to study the language between males and females. The gender differences have great impact on human language.