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\r\nin other languages to avoid gender-specific endings. We present a set of guidelines for the annotation and reformulation\r\nof gender-(un)fair texts and their application to a corpus of 1,024 portions of university administrative documents in\r\nItalian. Overall, the guidelines presented in this study prove to be valuable both practically and theoretically. They help\r\nidentify and address non-inclusive expressions while highlighting the complexities of obscuration and visibility in gender-fair\r\nlanguage reformulation. In addition, the statistical analysis of the created corpus shows how administrative texts tend to\r\ncontain gender-unfair language, especially the masculine overextended expressions, showing the need to adopt specific and\r\ncomplete guidelines that lead (and support the staff training) to the use of a more gender-fair language.