“La ministro e` incinta”: A Twitter Account of Women's Job Titles in Italian

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.

1 Introduction

The studies on how sexes are represented in lan

guage pertain to a transdisciplinary field of research where linguistic aspects intersect with psychological and social issues (Stahlberg et al., 2007) . The various types of gender representations in language, along with their asymmetries, is a matter widely studied in linguistics (Hellinger and Bußmann, 2001) as well as in social psychology (Horvath et al., 2016; Hodel et al., 2017) . Some of these studies have also affected Italian (Lepschy et al., 2001; Marcato and Thu¨ne, 2002; MucchiFaina, 2005; Maturi, 2020) , where a renewed debate has spread in the recent past on the use of a

Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). more gender-inclusive language.12

The presence of gender biases and stereotypes has drawn much attention even in the Natural Language Processing community.3 Research in this ifeld mainly focuses on the study of a model’s performance on data associated with a certain gender, or rather on the association between gender and certain concepts as found in language models (Sun et al., 2019) .

The present work, instead, aims at giving an exploratory account of the linguistic visibility of women in Italian language, with a focus in particular on job titles. For this purpose, we analyze the use of feminine forms used for job titles and professional roles in Twitter.

Studies on corpus-based discourse analysis have already focused on gender issues with respect to job titles in Italian. They either quantitatively evaluate the mostly used gendered forms in texts when referring to female referents (Formato, 2016; Formato, 2019a; Voghera and Vena, 2016) , or rather assess, by means of a survey among native speakers, the degree of acceptability of some feminine job titles (Castenetto and Ondelli, 2020) .

From a theoretical point of view, such works revolve (overtly or more indirectly) around the notion of markedness in language, that can be intended here as the “contrast between the unmarked (general, usual, non-salient) and the marked (special, emphatic)” (Clyne et al. (2009) cited in Formato (2019b, p.50)).4 In the present context, the “gen

1Elsewhere also defined as gender-fair, gender-neutral or

non-sexist language (Sczesny et al., 2016) .

2https://www.valigiablu.it/linguaggio-i nclusivo-dibattito/.

3See, for example, the Workshop Series on Gender Bias in NLP: https://genderbiasnlp.talp.cat/.

4In its most general sense, this term refers to an opposition between two - otherwise equal - linguistic elements, one of which is characterized by the presence of a mark and the other by its absence (e.g. voicing in voiced vs voiceless stops).

However, the notion underwent a number of different interpretations and applications. For an in-depth analysis of the differeral, usual, non-salient” case is represented by mas- such as the adjective or the article) according to two culine forms when used to express a generic ref- values: masculine and feminine. The gender value erence. This means that grammatical masculine is assigned according to phonological and semannouns are perceived and used as unmarked terms tic criteria (Thornton, 2005) . In assigning gender to (for both men and women) based on the idea that nouns denoting human referents, there is a strong they represent how the world is, opposing marked tendency to semantically match grammatical genfeminine terms which are seen as new, ungrammat- der with the sex of the referent (e.g., la maestra e` ical and ‘sounding bad’. arrivata vs. il maestro e` arrivato - ‘the teacher ar

While sharing with the studies mentioned above rived’). the same theoretical premise, the present work ad- Typically, the masculine is ‘overextended’ in refdresses the issue of women visibility in Italian lan- erence to mixed groups (e.g. tutti i candidati guage relying on user-generated data retrieved from ammessi - ‘allMASC admittedMASC candidates’MASC) Twitter: its peculiar nature as language data source, or abstract functions (e.g. le elezioni a sindaco along with the opportunity it offers to extract and - ‘the mayoralMASC elections’), as well as in the iflter data based on specific keywords and time case of individuals whose gender is not (yet) known spans, makes this platform particularly useful for (e.g. assumeremo un nuovo impiegato - ‘we’ll hire our purposes. a new employee’MASC). However, there are cases in

More precisely, we aimed at studying the dis- which, despite the existence of the feminine form, tribution over time of a selection of feminine job the masculine is also preferred to refer to a woman, titles, distinguishing in particular the following especially when the person holds a prestigious pocases: sition (Voghera and Vena, 2016) . In such a case, the assignment of grammatical gender does not fol• the use of marked forms, i.e. feminine forms low this semantic criterion: unmarked expressions referring to female professionals (e.g. la sin- referring to a woman (Thornton, 2009, p.126) or daca Raggi (‘mayorFEM Raggi’)); semi-marked expressions 6 are well attested. If we • (for a restricted set of examples) the use of consider gender not only as a morphological catesemi-marked forms (Formato, 2016) , i.e. the gory, but also as a semantic category, we can uncombination of masculine forms and feminine derstand that, in the symbolic horizon within which modifiers when referring to female profession- the preceding examples move, masculine gender is als (e.g. la neo-ministro e` incinta (‘theFEM taken as a neutral (or unmarked) form. newMASC ministerMASC is pregnant’)). The assumed neutrality of masculine forms has already been questioned from several points of view We thus provide some background knowledge on (Cavagnoli, 2013; Thornton, 2016; Voghera and the main linguistic conventions of Italian language Vena, 2016) . The seminal work by Alma Sabain the assignment of grammatical gender, also men- tini (1987), and the one proposed, more than two tioning some of the well-known studies that have decades later, by Cecilia Robustelli (2012 ), have challenged such conventions over the years, to- clarified the existence and use of feminine forms wards a more inclusive use of feminine forms, es- already provided for by the Italian linguistic syspecially for professions. We then describe how data tem, and allowed the formulation of recommendahas been collected and filtered, and show the distri- tions and guidelines for a more inclusive gendered bution of the selected job titles in both forms and language. across a 15-year time span. While such reform proposals went largely unheeded (Merkel et al., 2012) , more recent studies 2 Background seem to reveal a slight change in linguistic habits Italian is a grammatical gender language5 and pro- among Italian native speakers (Castenetto and Onvides for the mandatory classification of the noun delli, 2020) . Hence the choice to verify, by means and its respective targets in agreement (modifiers, of an analysis of user-generated content retrieved from Twitter, if a paradigm shift can be found with respect to the use of more gender-inclusive forms. ent perspectives with which this concept is treated, we refer to Moravcsik and Wirth (1986) and Haspelmath (2006).

5We refer to Stahlberg et al (2007) for the complete definition of grammatical gender, natural gender and genderless languages.

6https://www.repubblica.it/online/speci ale/presti/presti/presti.html. Starting from the proposals presented in the recommendations of Sabatini (1987) and Robustelli (2012), we selected a shortlist of 11 job titles with both masculine and feminine endings. The selection is based on morphological criteria, more precisely on the different categories of gender suffix pairs that can be added to the root of a noun. We thus included the following terms:

Job titles ending in -oMASC / -aFEM:

• ministro/ministra (‘minister’), • sindaco/sindaca (‘mayor’).

Job titles ending in -toreMASC / -triceFEM:

• rettore/rettrice (‘rector’).

Job titles ending in -ereMASC / -eraFEM:

• ingegnere/ingegnera (‘engineer’).

Job titles ending in -oMASC / -a or -essaFEM7 • avvocato/avvocata/avvocatessa (‘lawyer’).

Twitter recently introduced APIs (v2) that allow to

access the full history of public conversations since the first tweet was created on March 21st, 2006. Accordingly, we take advantage of Twitter’s fullarchive search endpoint8 for retrieving each tweet written in Italian and containing at least one of the words listed above, from March 21st, 2006 to March 21st, 2021 aiming at depicting the scenario of their use diachronically through a span of 15 years. 3.1

Data Cleaning

A preliminary data analysis shows several noisy

tweets in the dataset. Some keywords are indeed particularly affected by homonymy and polysemy. For example, the keywords sindaco and sindaca are also inflections of the verb sindacare (‘to judge, criticize, inspect’). A particular example is also the homonymy of the word rettore (‘rector’MASC) with 7The suffix -essa is used as a derivative for female referents starting from the male noun (Formato, 2019a) , and its possible demeaning connotation has been matter of debate (Merkel et al., 2012; Mucchi-Faina, 2005) . In Sabatini’s Recommendations, its use is discouraged in favor of the suffix -a (or -e for some epicene nouns).

8https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/ twitter-api/tweets/search/api-reference/ get-tweets-search-all. the surname of a famous Italian singer and songwriter (Donatella Rettore), and of the word avvocata (‘lawyer’FEM) with a homonymous district of the city of Naples, Italy.

Other keywords are also affected by the use of ifgurative language. Particularly relevant is the use of the keywords ministro and avvocata in a religious context. Indeed, in Christianity, priests are also called ministri di Dio (‘ministers of the Lord’), while avvocata nostra (‘most gracious advocate’) is part of the prayer ‘Hail Holy Queen’. These few examples help to catch a glimpse of the difficult task of cleaning and removing noisy tweets from this dataset automatically. Therefore, we performed a semi-automatic data cleaning by using filters tailored for each word.

The final dataset consists of around 9.7 million tweets overall; Table 1 reports the number of tweets per keyword, as resulted after the cleaning process.9 Drawing inspiration from studies in demography, where male to female ratio is a common parameter, we report the proportion of masculine (M) and feminine (F) forms in terms of M/F RATIO, where the higher the value the greater the unbalance between the two forms at the expense of the latter.

MASC # tweets ministro: 3,575,613 sindaco: 4,005,156 rettore: 138,328 ingegnere: 291,334 avvocato: 1,133,456

sum: unique:

On the numerical front we can see that the number

of tweets containing the masculine form is greatly dominant. This is especially evident in the case of the keyword pair ingegnere/ingegnera (M/F RATIO of 61.22) despite the fact that the ratio of male and female engineers in Italy is 5.38.10

On the other hand, the feminine words that seem to be used in the most balanced way with respect to their masculine counterpart are ministra (M/F RA

9It is worth pointing out, however, that several tweets con

tain two or more keywords; they are counted in the table as many times as the number of keywords they contain. For this reason the values of ‘sum’ are higher than ‘unique’.

10See page 13: https://www.cni.it/images/Ne ws/2020/Iscritti anno 2020 LQ.pdf.

TIO of 12.32) and sindaca (M/F RATIO of 15.62). which governmental changes occurred in Italy. In particular, in both those time spans there have been 4 Data Analysis and Discussion female ministers who have been highly politically exposed.11 sTwehorevmifirnesngt’tsshtjeeopbtreotinftdloessuorefxdtphalteoarferaednqaiunlyetsnhicsiyscwoofonurskisse.tsofotfhoebs-ix muAstnaortdh-eyrelflaocwtwlionrethpmiennFtiiognuirneg1idsethpeicttrienngdthoef uthsee of the word sindaca (‘mayor’FEM). The word seems

In Figure 1 we represent the frequency of femi- to have started to be used more frequently in connine job titles with respect to the total of terms used junction with the election of two female mayors in to describe the profession (FEM / FEM + MASC). two large Italian cities.12 Also the relationship beWe observe that from 2006 to 2021 there is a ten- tween red u and blue r lines in the same figure dency to a more frequent use of female forms in presents a notable trend. Those lines respectively general. However, relevant spikes are present on show the use of avvocata and avvocatessa (both: the left side of the chart. We believe they are caused ‘lawyer’FEM). It is peculiar how the two lines show by the scarcity of data before 2010, which is also the same tendency throughout the years with the imputable to the low popularity of the microblog- preference for the term avvocatessa on top of avvoging platform in Italy before that year. Further- cata, until the year 2017. From that moment on, more, among the 6 sixfeminine keywords used as there is an inversion of trend and the occurrence of case study in the present work, 2 of them do not ifrst term starts decreasing (blue r line), favoring even have any occurrence in the totality of the year the use of the second one (red u line). The os2006. Their use starts with a few occurrences only cillation between avvocatessa and avvocata therefrom the year after (avvocatessa and rettrice). fore remains, but it seems that the latter has been

The purple q line (see Figure 1), illustrating the increasingly gaining some ground. trend of the word ministra (‘minister’FEM) shows how the word has been increasingly used around The word rettrice (‘rector’FEM), marked by the 2016-2017, and then again around 2019-2020. The orange s line in Figure 1, has an averagely growuse of this term seem to increase during the elec- 11Marianna Madia and Maria Elena Boschi in 2016-2017 tion period and to decrease immediately afterwards. and Luciana Lamorgese and Lucia Azzolina in 2019-2020. This outcome is indeed in line with the periods in 12Virginia Raggi in Rome and Chiara Appendino in Turin. ing distribution through time (around 2%), with a spike of increase in 2020, when – for the first time – a woman has been elected as rector in the biggest university of Europe: La Sapienza in Rome.

Finally, ingegnera (‘engineer’FEM) is the only one among the six terms taken into consideration with a low, though constant, trend throughout the temporal span of 15 years (around 1.6%), with only one recent spike around 2020-2021 (green t line). 4.1

Analysis of N-grams

In a second step of our analysis, we aimed at investigating on the use of semi-marked forms (see Section 1). We focused on the two terms that presented the most balanced distributions with respect to their masculine counterpart (see Table 1), i.e. ministra and sindaca, and studied when and how the masculine form has been used to refer to a female referent in the real world. To do so, we extracted n-grams where one of the two tokens is one of the masculine words selected for the study and the second token is a feminine determiner or nominal modifier.

Hence, we selected the following 2-grams of interest: • la ministro/sindaco

(‘theFEM minister/mayor’MASC) • ministro/sindaco donna and donna ministro/sindaco (‘female minister/mayor’MASC) • signora ministro/sindaco

(‘Madame minister/mayor’MASC)

In Figure 2 we show two charts (one for the word

‘minister’, and one for the word ‘mayor’) illustrating the ratio between the selected marked forms and the sum of such forms with semi-marked forms.

In both cases it is once again evident that the data collected before 2010 is very scarce, and that relevant statistics are, therefore, to be considered valid only after that year.

For both charts it is shown how the tendency of using marked forms (la ministra and la sindaca) is growing throughout the years; on the other hand, expressions where the female attribute is explicitly mentioned – such as signora ministra (‘Madame minister’FEM) and signora sindaca (‘Madame mayor’FEM) – are still very frequent (red t lines in both charts).

Despite the outcomes derived from the analysis of n-grams, we acknowledge that the procedure described in this subsection is fairly limited. Beside the fact we studied the distribution of only two words out of the six selected for the present study, the availability of the same data enriched with partof-speech tagging and parsing information would be highly beneficial for the automatic identification of marked and semi-marked forms. 5

Conclusion and Future Work

In this paper, we reported the results of a corpusbased account of the linguistic visibility of women in Italian language, with a focus in particular on job titles, and using Twitter as data source. From a preliminary analysis of a selection of profession nouns, we found that some marked forms are increasingly being preferred in spite of semi-marked expressions. Besides extending and systematizing this analysis to other case studies, we also aim to observe the usage of such forms by Italian native speakers by tackling the issue as a stance detection task, so to assess how the users value a given marked form and, more in general, the adoption of more gender-inclusive linguistic habits. Furthermore, the messages leveraged on this topic might overlap with the task of misogyny detection and hate speech detection as well, broadening the horizons of three different NLP detection tasks. This design choice can also be motivated with regard to contextual stance detection (Cignarella et al., 2020; AlDayel and Magdy, 2021) , to investigate how supporters/opponents of inclusive language strategies are segregated in different online social network communities.

Finally, due to its preliminary and exploratory nature, this work only reports the distribution of feminine and masculine forms, which are the two values for gender assignment taken in consideration for the analysis. We are well aware, however, that a comprehensive study of gender-inclusive language must necessarily cover all those linguistic forms that refer to the multiple and diverse identities in the gender spectrum.

With respect to this point, innovative forms have been proposed in the last years, in order to overcome the binary opposition, even in a grammatical gender language as Italian, such as the schwa (@), the asterisk (∗ ), the ‘at’ sign (@), and other graphic solutions. This is another aspect that is worth exploring in a stance detection perspective, so to assess users’ stance regarding the use of such linguistic innovations and their spread in everyday language.

Acknowledgments

The work of A. T. Cignarella is supported by the

European project ‘STERHEOTYPES’ funded by Compagnia di San Paolo and VolksWagen Stiftung under the ‘Challenges for Europe’ call. The work of M. Sanguinetti is funded by PRIN 2017 (20192022) project HOPE - High quality Open data Publishing and Enrichment.

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