Come si designano le donne

In this paper we examine how women self-designate their professional roles in Italian and Spanish, with a specific focus on formal written texts (academic and medical curricula vitae). In Italian, a comparison between two corpora collected approximately ten years apart shows a systematic decrease in masculine lemmas and an increase in feminine and commongender forms, indicating a slow yet steady rethinking of the so-called “unmarked” masculine. However, feminine forms remain more fragile in higher-prestige roles, and many designations continue to appear in the masculine even when the grammar regularly allows feminine. An intergenerational analysis confirms the trend among women under 45, who are more inclined to use feminine forms, though considerable variation persists. The cross-linguistic comparison with Spanish points to a clear difference between the two languages, as Spanish shows a systematic and widespread use of feminine forms, in both academic and medical contexts. In the latter, except for the widely used feminine dottoressa (doctor.FEM), masculine forms dominate in Italian, especially for toplevel professional titles (e.g., primario, chief physician, chirurgo, surgeon). Overall, the findings suggest that linguistic visibility is not merely a matter of grammatical norms, but a mechanism of professional recognition and social equity.