L’auteure constate que les femmes pourraient être plus visibles dans le monde universitaire français: La féminisation lexicale. Une étude menée sur vingt thèses de doctorat

Abstract

This essay examines the linguistic representation of women in the French academic world since the implementation of feminist language reforms in the 80s and 90s. More specifically, it analyses a corpus built of twenty doctoral theses published in France, focusing on the grammatical gender of the terms auteur (author) and chercheur (researcher) when referring to women. The analysis shows that the feminine form of auteur (auteure), as recommended in the circular Femme j’écris ton nom : guide d’aide à la féminisation des noms de métiers, grades, titres et fonctions (Becquer et al. 1999) published by the French government, is in close competition with the masculine form; however, the latter continues to prevail. It is also observed that auteure is more commonly employed by women than by men and that certain scientific disciplines (such as the social sciences) are more likely to use the feminine form than others (such as finance). As for the use of chercheur, the corpus was not capable of providing a sufficient amount of examples, thus making it impossible to determine how women are referred to with the term.