Is There Linguistic Sexism in Job Ads? (Sociolinguistic Analysis of Advertisements for the Italian Job Market)

The problem of linguistic sexism and its sociolinguistic repercussions has aroused the interest of linguists, legislators and politicians for almost forty years. With this contribution I intend to show whether linguistic sexism still has reflections in the Italian language through empirical work on job advertisements for the Italian job market. The study is based on a corpus of job advertisements published online in the period between 03 and 10 November 2023.
The article presents at first the language-society relationship. In the second point follows a representation of the phenomenon of linguistic sexism as well as talking about the inclusive masculine. The application part takes place from the third to the fifth point: the phenomenon is introduced in the job advertisements, then follows the corpus and the data collection methodology, followed by the data analysis. The analysis examines the presence and form of the linguistic sexicm in three Italian sites that offer job opportunities both in the titles and texts of the advertisements, to verify whether they comply with the morphological rules, the State legislation and the recommendations of linguists and what this reflects. In the last point the concluding reflections are shown.