Gender equality and occupational designations in Croatian

This paper deals with gender equality as a principle and its implementation with respect to the form of designations that refer to occupations that both men and women may work in. The starting points are the changes that Croatian society has undergone from the middle of the twentieth century onwards that led to the participation of women across a wide range of occupations. Further to this, socio-political as well as ideological developments have challenged the dominance of men in the workforce or labour market in general. As far as language is concerned, this brings up the question of the way members of either sex are represented within the workface and the titles or terms used to refer to them. In Croatian there are many word formation possibilities that enable the development or coining of new terms for male or female nomina agenti (performers of actions). Diachronic and synchronic analysis shows that in Croatian, this process occurs invariably via suffixation. Therefore, there are few linguistic obstacles to achieving what is set out in Croatia’s Act on Gender Equality which specifies that advertised positions must be clear in stating that any person from either sex may apply and that the title of the position should be provided in both the male and female variants. Drawing on multiple corpora to examine the forms of occupational designations that are used in authoritative documents, in job advertisements, in select workplaces and in official or semi-official correspondence, we find that across three iterations of the National Classification of Occupations there are numerous inconsistencies, notably single-gender designations lacking counterparts for the opposite sex and occasional semantic asymmetries reflecting contemporary usage. These issues are substantially reduced in the latest 2023 version, which contains approximately twenty such instances. Feminine-only forms persist mainly in traditionally female-dominated occupations (e.g. vezilja ‘embroiderer’, primalja ‘midwife’), although masculine equivalents have since been proposed by linguistic authorities. Conversely, some masculine-only forms and gender-atypical “outliers” remain, while certain gendered nouns have expanded semantically to encompass both women and men. Parallel developments are observed in job advertisements, where gender-inclusive strategies are increasingly adopted, though unmarked masculine forms remain common, especially in employer-generated advertisements. Educational settings reveal partial symmetry in formal terminology but asymmetries in colloquial usage. Official written communication continues to favour masculine-gender forms, except in politically salient contexts where inclusivity is more explicit. Finally, commercial signage demonstrates variable gender marking, with some professionals adopting gender-neutral constructions to avoid gender specification. Overall, the findings illustrate gradual but uneven progress toward gender-inclusive language for occupational designations.