Emerging trends in gender-specific occupational titles in Italian newspapers

The grammatical gender system can influence the way the semantic gender is perceived. Italian is a grammatical gender language, in which nouns are classified for gender. In this work, we investigate the usage of gender-specific forms of occupational titles in a diachronic corpus of 3 billion tokens extracted from two Italian newspapers. The hypothesis is that the usage of gender-specific forms might be influenced by socio-cultural aspects, such as changes in the employment policy. We automatically collect a set of occupational titles and perform a diachronic analysis exploiting the frequency of gender-specific forms. Results show a correlation between changes in the usage of gender-specific forms and socio-cultural events.