The study “Challenging implicit gender stereotypes in Italian news through language” by Monia Azzalini from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice investigated gender stereotypes in Italian news by looking at a sample of occupational names and political titles. 

Gender stereotypes are a long-standing academic concern, stemming from the concept of “symbolic annihilation” by Gaye Tuchman (1978: 3). Linguistic choices always convey a perspective, as analyzed by Michael Stubbs (1996: 197).

Based on these (and more in the full article), in the article, the author investigates whether and to what extent Italian daily news conveys gender stereotypes through linguistic choices. This is done via associations conveyed by occupational names and political titles from a corpus of Italian news.

Italian language, like many latin-originated languages, is gender-marked in various levels. All nouns basically have a grammatical gender, feminine or masculine. Without getting into the details, what is relevant here is that many women in top positions have been referred to with a masculine noun for their occupation, a choice far from neutral.

Through a careful, detailed analysis of the corpus and the terms there, the author concludes that the names of occupations and political positions encode gender information and mirror trends in broader corpora. The author cautions that these stereotypes can become rigidified over time. 

Italian journalistic language can also encode gender stereotypes. However, the author points out that the Italian language, with its gender-marked grammatical system, can function as  a tool for the journalists to challenge gender stereotypes by consistently using feminine forms when referring to women.

The article “Challenging implicit gender stereotypes in Italian news through language” by Monia Azzalini is in Journalism. (Free abstract).

Picture: White, red, and green flag by Michele Bitetto

License Unsplash.