Beyond Obscuration and Visibility: Thoughts on the Different Strategies of Gender-Fair Language in Italian

This study focuses on the growing importance of gender-fair language and explores innovative strategies proposed also in other languages to avoid gender-specific endings. We present a set of guidelines for the annotation and reformulation of gender-(un)fair texts and their application to a corpus of 1,024 portions of university administrative documents in Italian. Overall, the guidelines presented in this study prove to be valuable both practically and theoretically. They help identify and address non-inclusive expressions while highlighting the complexities of obscuration and visibility in gender-fair language reformulation. In addition, the statistical analysis of the created corpus shows how administrative texts tend to contain gender-unfair language, especially the masculine overextended expressions, showing the need to adopt specific and complete guidelines that lead (and support the staff training) to the use of a more gender-fair language.