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Which is the fairest of them all?

This post is by Martina Rosola. Martina is a researcher in Philosophy of Language. Her main interest is the role of language in systems of injustice and how it can serve to either perpetuate or dismantle them. Within this perspective, she specialized in gender-fair language.

Martina Rosola


Evaluating gender-fair strategies in Italian

Do you want to avoid the masculine generic and struggle to choose among the many gender-fair alternatives? This post is for you. Gender-fair language strategies abound and greatly differ from one another: some are hard for the reader, others for the writer; some aim to better represent women, others focus on non-binary people. But which one is “the best”? Being a philosopher, I cannot but reply “it depends”. If you have a word limit, visibility strategies, which repeat the masculine words in the feminine too (e.g., “lui o lei”, he or she), are counter-suggested. Innovative neutrality strategies substitute masculine words with neologisms (e.g., “lai”, ze), preserving the word count. However, innovative strategies are rarely welcome in formal contexts. 

Most importantly, moreover, they pose accessibility issues: they are challenging for people with dyslexia and several screen readers misread them. This is especially true for a language with a pervasive, binary gender marking like Italian as the neologisms substituting masculine generics are ubiquitous. Conservative neutrality strategies, consisting in using gender-neutral expressions (e.g., “coloro che”, those who), are easy to read and suitable for formal contexts, but can be cumbersome to adopt. They’re further the feeblest type of strategy in countering gender stereotypes because they might slip unnoticed and fail to challenge the pre-existing biases. 

Combining different strategies in the same text can counterbalance the practical advantages and limitations of each. In particular, spacing gender-neutral expressions (i.e., conservative neutrality) with a few neologisms (i.e., innovative strategies) effectively blocks stereotypes and preserves accessibility: the neologisms make the gender-fair intent obvious, raising awareness on possible activated stereotypes; the prevalence of well-established words ensures accessibility.

While efficient, this solution is not completely fair. As Dembroff and Wodak (2018) highlighted with respect to English pronouns, adding innovative forms alongside binary gendered ones is inegalitarian: men and women have a dedicated linguistic form, while all non-binary identities get lumped together. Because of that, they argue that neopronouns should replace gendered pronouns entirely. Such a solution, however, does not seem feasible in case of a heavily gendered language as it would involve getting rid of the whole gender system, which however plays a syntactic role too. Paradoxically, although the primary goal of innovative strategies is to correctly refer to non-binary people, the only feasible way to adopt them in a heavily gendered language is actually unfair towards non-binary people. 

When fairness is concerned, conservative visibility (i.e., repeating the masculine word in the feminine too - e.g., he or she) needs to be discarded as it reinforces binarism. The only equitable strategy is conservative neutrality as it avoids gendered expressions. As mentioned before, however, this strategy is inefficient in countering stereotypes. To overcome this limitation, I propose to deliberately construct unnatural gender-neutral expressions by having nouns function as adjectives, for instance, as in “le persone infermiere” (the nurse people). The oddness of such expressions, I hypothesize, will make gender salient and prevent biases to operate undisturbed: tweaked like this, conservative neutrality is not only equitable but also effective in countering stereotypes.

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