“La ministro è incinta”: A twitter account of women's job titles in Italian

Cignarella A. T.;Lai M.;Marra A.;Sanguinetti M.

2021-01-01

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Abstract

We analyze the use of feminine forms indicating professions and roles held by women in Italian. The study is based on Twitter and collects data from 2006 to 2021. This allows us to set up both the quantitative and the qualitative study in a diachronic perspective on a time span of 15 years. We observe the distribution over time of a selection of feminine job titles (i.e., minister, mayor, rector, engineer and lawyer), compared to their masculine counterparts, distinguishing in particular the following cases: use of marked forms and use of semi-marked forms. The analysis shows that the trend of using feminine (i.e. marked) forms is generally growing through time. However, the unbalance between the actual number of women employed in some professions and the use of the correspondent feminine job title is wide.