Fare spazio alle donne in “un mondo di uomini”

This chapter moves from the observation that, at the time of writing, official documents of the University of Salerno (as well as those of several other Italian Universities) referred to specific women with masculine role nouns, and used the so-called generic masculine to refer to mixed groups containing both men and women and to unspecified persons that could equally well be men or women. Several contexts of reference are described and discussed, showing the difficulties they pose and the opportunities they offer, with respect to the Italian language, for the goal of making explicit the presence of women in the referent. The Statutes and other official documents of two Italian Universities (Tuscia and Trento) that have adopted gender-fair language are analyzed, discussing pros and cons of the solutions they adopted.