Using words to change society: how gender-fair language can promote the empowerment of women

Language is a powerful tool through which we make sense of the world. It is connected to our cognition: through language we create mental representations of the world around us. The words we use shape our beliefs and consequently impact on our behaviors. Language also influences the definition of our identity and of social categories, so it can contribute to build and reinforce stereotypes. Considering its potential power on the way we think, language can also be a fundamental tool to promote a more equitable society. In the last few decades much research has been done on the link between language and sexism, analyzing the effects on our cognition and proposing alternative linguistic forms to promote a more gender-fair and inclusive language. The first part of this dissertation will describe the link between language and mental representation illustrating the main theories and models that analyze the relationship between language and sexism. Then we will analyze the case of masculine generics and occupational titles, the two main forms of grammatical gender asymmetries in language, applied to English and Italian; this comparison will allow us to consider the differences between grammatical gender languages and natural gender languages. In the next section we will describe some examples of gender-fair language and their application in different contexts, analyzing the results of experiments which test their effectiveness as possible alternative inclusive linguistic forms. We will conclude considering the actual situation of use of gender-fair language and illustrating strategies to promote it, at an individual and a societal level.