Stereotypes, prestige and grammar: occupational job titles in Italian

Abstract

In the Italian language, agreement in gender is canonical in all instances except one. High prestige job titles are often used in the masculine form even if the referent is female, thus (more or less unconsciously) indicating that the concept of high status is undivided from the masculine form, which is strictly connected to the male sex. In Italy, little research has been conducted on the effects of the feminisation of professions. For this purpose, two experiments were carried out. The first one aimed at comparing the masculine form used for male referents (MM), the masculine form used for female referents (MF) and the feminine form used for female referents (FF), to provide insight into whether the linguistic form influences the perceptions of prestige, of competence and of gender typicality of professions. The second experiment measured response times and proportion of affirmative responses to single lexical items of high and low prestige professions, each randomly presented both in the masculine and feminine form, to further investigate whether the perception of prestige is influenced by the morphological ending. Results of Experiment 1 documented an effect with respect to gender typicality, with a difference between MM and FF: female proper nouns introduced by job titles carrying the feminine grammatical gender diminished the general male bias. The results of the MF condition have no straightforward interpretation and should be checked with further observations. Linguistic intervention did not affect perceptions of prestige and competence. In Experiment 2, a main effect of gender and a main effect of prestige were found: feminine words were processed faster than masculine words, and high-prestige words were processed faster than low-prestige words. No interaction was found between grammatical gender and prestige ascriptions. These results were replicated analysing the proportion of affirmative responses. Overall, Experiment 2 did not provide evidence for the fact that masculine job titles augment prestige ascriptions.