Grammatical gender is only found in about 20% of the world’s languages, including French, which marks masculine and feminine distinctions through determiners and agreement of adjectives. In French, the masculine form is traditionally used as a “generic” to describe mixed-gender groups, yet research shows that these masculine generics strongly bias mental representations toward men from childhood onward and contribute to the invisibility of women in social contexts. In response, several inclusive or gender-neutral strategies have emerged, such as using epicene nouns, feminization through double forms, or newly created gender forms (e.g., ‘æ’, ‘ë’, capital letters, or the ‘-i’ ending). Critics argue that these innovations are difficult to learn and grammatically complex, but recent work suggests that they can be acquired quickly. However, we still lack quantitative data on how often gender-marked words referring to humans appear in real French usage. The current database addresses this gap by analyzing newspaper articles and speech data to estimate the scale of change required.
Lemus-Serrano et al. (Thu,) studied this question.