| | |  Editorials | Issues | December 2009 
While in Italy...
 Miren Gutierrez & Oriana Boselli - Inter Press Service
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December 27, 2009
 |  | Language is never neutral. A language represents the society that uses it.
- Irene Giacobbe |  | | |
Actually, they are still debating whether the gender of titles is strictly a grammatical issue. But some disagree.
"Language is never neutral. A language represents the society that uses it. That means that a society that represents women in a discriminatory way is a society that justifies and shares such discrimination," says Irene Giacobbe of the association, Power Gender.
Like professor Angelica Mucchi-Faina of Perugia University, Giacobbe thinks that the issue of how to address women in positions of responsibility has already been settled in Italy, although only in theory.
However, "many women say that their titles sound badly in the feminine, they don't want to be an ‘avvocata’, although it is the correct form," she says. "What happens is that even observant media make mistakes calling them ‘avvocato’ or use the pejorative ‘avvocatessa’ and ‘presidentessa’ deliberately, because they cannot be so ignorant as to using a pejorative ending without realising it. And you end up in ‘humorous’ situations where you read ‘il ministro indossava una gonna vaporosa’ (the {male} minister wore a vaporous skirt)."
As in Spanish, in Italian the feminine ending ‘essa’ has pejorative connotations indicating a position of a lesser category or the wife of the real person in power.
"In the Italian Switzerland," she says, "there is a tragicomic difference in the use of news agencies. Even if ANSA (the state Italian agency) has guidelines to avoid sexism, most of its stories from Italy use the masculine form for women’s titles, while when it reports from Switzerland and Germany they use correctly ‘cancelliera’ (chancellor), ‘ministra’ and ‘avvocata’." |
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