I heard it on the radio the other day. Someone introducing a colleague as “professeurrrre,” the final r purred out a beat too long. Just enough to make sure everyone clocks that yes, they are talking about a woman, yes, this is the feminized form, and yes, they’re using it on purpose. It’s not a slip of the tongue. It establishes a position.
For native English speakers, it’s all a bit surreal. Isn’t inclusive language supposed to make gender less of a big deal? Why does the French version make it more explicit?
Call me Cheffe
France has spent much of the last decade debating how to make its language more inclusive. Nowadays guidelines are meant to stop French defaulting to the masculine as if it were neutral.
The most visible tool is the point médian: les étudiant·e·s instead of les étudiants. Then there’s iel, for people who don’t identify with il or elle. And there’s a push to feminize traditionally masculine job titles — professeure, auteure, artisane.
French ‘needs’ this kind of intervention, and English mostly doesn’t, because of its grammar. French gender isn’t just a label on nouns — it ripples through every layer of the language. A room of 29 happy women and 1 man is still, grammatically, ils étaient contents (they were happy). The masculine isn’t a stylistic choice there; it’s structural. So making French more inclusive means tinkering, big time, with the language itself.
French adds, English subtracts
English tackled the same issue, but differently. “Chairman” often became simply “chair”. Increasingly, women are described as actors rather than actresses, and many restaurants now use “waiter” for everyone.
So the French are shouting the difference, the English are pretending it was never there — and somehow both hope they’ve solved the same problem.
In France, the debate is still very much alive. Governments, academics, language purists and campaigners continue to argue over how French should evolve—sometimes over a single extra e.
For newcomers, it can be bewildering. One person says Madame le Maire, another insists on Madame la Maire. The words may be ordinary, but they often carry more cultural weight than an outsider expects.
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Living in France isn’t just about learning the paperwork. It’s also about learning how the country thinks. Sometimes it’s through a form from the tax office. Sometimes it’s through a debate about a single letter at the end of a word.
If you’re finding French life more complicated than you expected, I’d be happy to help you make sense of it.
