Gender-neutrality in Languages With Grammatical Gender - Slavic Languages - Russian

Russian

Russian intrinsically shares many of the same non-gender-neutral characteristics with other European languages.

Certain words are understood to refer to either men or women regardless of their grammatical gender. For example, человек ("human"; grammatically masculine), as opposed to мужчина ("man"; masculine with respect to agreement, but morphologically feminine) and женщина ("woman"; feminine), and are in fact traditionally used in cases where gender-specific terms would be used in English. Several terms that roughly mean "person" are grammatically neuter or feminine, and can similarly be used to refer to either men or women: лицо (neuter, lit. "face"), персона (feminine), личность (feminine). All such terms have bureaucratic and other (not necessarily negative) connotations and are seldom used colloquially. Note also that as a general rule Russian does not use neuter terms for people, just as English does not use "it" as gender-neutral pronoun.

Job titles have a masculine and a feminine version in Russian, though in most cases the feminine version is only used in colloquial speech. The masculine form is typically treated as "unmarked", i.e. it does not necessarily imply that the person is male, while the feminine form is "marked" and can only be used when referring to a woman. In some cases, the feminine title is used, on occasions, as derogatory or with connotation of a suboptimal performance or is only used as slang, e.g. врачиха (female doctor), директорша or sometimes директриса (female director). In other cases, this is not the case: актриса (actress), поэтесса (poetess; e.g. Anna Akhmatova insisted to be called поэт instead). Even in cases where the feminine term is not seen as derogatory, however, there is a growing tendency to use masculine term in more formal contexts that stress the individual's membership in a profession: "В 15 лет она стала учителем фортепиано" ("At age 15 she became a piano teacher", formal register). The feminine form may be used in less formal context to stress a personal description the individual: "Настя стала учительницей" ("Nastia became a teacher", informal register). Military ranks and formal offices may also have feminine term (e.g. генеральша, советница), which usually means that the referred person is the wife of the appropriate office holder. However, this use is somewhat archaic.

For this reason, use of the masculine occupation terms when referring to women, is in fact seen as more politically correct and constitutes a growing trend. The actual gender of the person can still be indicated through the verb: for example, in the phrase врач посоветовала (the doctor/m advised/f), the gender of the verb shows that the doctor was female, even as the masculine (more respectful) occupation term is used. Note, however, that there are also some grammatically feminine terms with positive connotations that are routinely used for both men and women, for example, знаменитость (celebrity).

Russian adjectives are inflected for grammatical gender and so are verbs in the past tense. When a masculine term is used to refer to a woman, the verb usually remains in the feminine, while adjectives and possessive pronouns may take either masculine or feminine form: наш новый врач посоветовала (our/m new/m doctor/m recommended/f) or наша новая врач посоветовала (our/f new/f doctor/m recommended/f). The former usage is more formal, while the latter is more colloquial.

The third-person pronoun typically reflects the actual gender of the person when this is known, врач сказала, что она... (the doctor/m said/f that she...), but typically agrees with the grammatical gender of its antecedent when an abstract person is discussed: Каждый врач должен помнить, что он... (Every/m doctor/m must/m remember that he...)