Gender is a grammatical category in most European languages, to be more precise, in the Indo-European languages. Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are not IE languages and do not have gender while English has lost this grammatical category. Gender of animate nouns is assumed to coincide with sex, but there are many exceptions.

Today European gender languages have problems with the designations of professions. One would imagine that there should be a feminine form of every professional name, but in some languages this is not the case, or the theoretically possible feminine form is not actually used. As Kinder & Savini put it: “Due to the ever increasing presence of women at all levels in society, including fields that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of men, the issue of gender in language has acquired sociopolitical implications”.  In some languages it is morphologically difficult to form feminine agentives, at least in some instances.  Nissen (1986, 731) writes: “In principle, there is no reason whatsoever not  to provide women with feminine titles, especially in languages like Spanish, whose structure provides the necessary options. As to the factors that block a consistent and rapid innovation in the area of feminine word formation, there seem to be mainly three: (1) the existence of terms with ambiguous (not to say dubious) connotations; (2) the derogatory character of feminine titles, and (3) the fact that a feminine title may mean ‘wife of the masculine title-holder’”. Olivares (1984) even concluded that Spanish women were best served using the masculine terms for their job denominations, in order to avoid the negative side-effects.

In this paper I examine material from Italian, (Peninsular) Spanish, Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian and, by way of contrast, from English, Turkish and Tagalog.