The Acceptability of Feminine Job Titles in Italian Newspaper Articles: A Survey Involving Italian Native Speakers

This paper describes a procedure to submit linguistic data to informants to assess the acceptability of gender-inclusive linguistic structures. The procedure was tested on informants who differed in terms of sex, geographical origin and age. They were asked to assess extracts from newspaper articles including masculine and feminine forms of professions and titles. A wide range of combinations was presented: masculine nouns referring to women; pronoun and adjective gender agreement with masculine nouns referring to women; pronoun and adjective gender agreement with a feminine subject accompanied by masculine nouns referring to the profession; alternating masculine and feminine forms; feminine articles introducing masculine nouns describing professions etc. The informants were asked to provide an overall assessment of each text and were not made aware of the objective of the survey. Although opinions, varied, the results point to a weakening of the assumed dislike for the feminine forms of nouns describing titles and professions. The increase in their acceptability has been probably strengthened by their frequent use in the mass media. Furthermore, those forms provide a solution to the morphological and syntactic inconsistencies considered by the informants as a violation of Italian grammar rules.