The debate over feminine occupational titles continues. Media outlets are increasingly using feminine-gendered professional titles, yet their use remains unsystematized at the official level. Even the Government Commissioner for Gender Policy, Kateryna Levchenko, who consistently advocates for feminine forms, is officially listed in documents as the masculine “government commissioner.” What does the future hold for feminine job titles? What is happening with language standards and spelling rules? And should those who already use them stop? These questions were discussed on March 18 at Ukrinform during a panel titled “Why Using Feminine Job Titles Matters.”
Spelling rules are not standards
It all started on March 2, when an article appeared on the Ukrinform website stating that the head of the National Commission on State Language Standards, Yuliia Chernobrov, had declared that not using feminine job titles does not constitute a violation of the state language standard. The statement sparked a wave of debate — feminist organizations had long fought for feminine forms to be used on equal footing with their masculine counterparts. The 2019 Ukrainian spelling reform had included a provision on the formation of feminine nouns.
And then came this announcement. To clarify the situation and set the record straight, Government Gender Policy Commissioner Kateryna Levchenko and La Strada NGO initiated a meeting with experts.
The Commission’s position is that “using feminine job titles is not a violation, and neither is not using them.”
They also draw a distinction between a language standard and spelling rules.
“Ukrainian spelling rules govern word inflection and punctuation. By definition, they cannot mandate the use of feminine job titles — only the correct forms when multiple options exist. Feminine titles are a broad semantic category of words, and they should be codified and regulated through dictionaries and reference guides, and ultimately through legislation,” said Kateryna Ponomarenko, a member of the National Commission on State Language Standards.
Her colleague Nataliia Mazur noted that language is a living organism in constant development, and lexical units, including feminine job titles, cannot be standardized.
“Only terminology can be subject to standardization. The Ukrainian spelling rules since 2019 merely acknowledge that in Ukrainian language practice, feminine nouns denoting persons are formed using a range of suffixes,” Nataliia Mazur said.
Kateryna Ponomarenko believes that both feminine and masculine forms referring to women by professional activity are currently used in parallel, and the Commission cautions against a purely formal approach to the issue.
“In our opinion, only cooperation between linguists, civil society representatives, and government bodies can help establish a shared approach to feminine job titles. Only the findings of the latest linguistic research and proposals from specialists will be able to regulate language creation and support the free, systematic development of the language,” she said.
Media language shapes the language norm
The National Commission on State Language Standards notes that feminine job titles are not a new phenomenon in Ukrainian — historical dictionaries and classical literature attest to their long presence. As society evolves, new words naturally emerge, and feminine forms follow. Media play a key role in popularizing them.
“The language of the media is the language that promotes and models the language norm, linguistic behavior, and a culture of gender-sensitive communication,” said Commission member Olha Hrytsenko.
At the same time, Olha Hrytsenko believes that constructions like “men and women journalists” violate the principle of linguistic economy and represent an artificial stacking of parallel male and female designations.
Liza Kuzmenko, head of Women in Media, argues that using feminine job titles in media is important. Monitoring conducted by the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting — Gender Balance on Regional TV Channels in the Second Half of 2025 — shows that regional media are using feminine job titles at quite a high rate. Figures vary by region, but everywhere the share exceeds 50%, and in Sumy region it reaches 93%.
“That’s a strong result. There was a great deal of criticism and resistance in the media community to using feminitives. But now we can see that almost all outlets on the so-called Quality Media List compiled by the Institute of Mass Information use them. The practice is also widespread in regional media. Language is not solely about word formation and spelling. We use feminine job titles and will continue to do so. This process cannot be stopped. Today’s media should reflect the kind of society we want to have tomorrow,” said Kuzmenko.
Andrii Kulykov, co-founder of Hromadske Radio, noted that debates over feminine job titles will continue for a long time — at least as long as the page of the State Language Protection Commissioner still reads “Commissioner” in the masculine form.
Feminine job titles are about more than language
The use of feminine job titles is not only a linguistic issue — it is also a matter of policy and even national security.
Larysa Kompantseva, head of the Department of Strategic Communications and Applied Linguistics at the National Academy of the Security Service of Ukraine, argues that using feminitives can also serve as a cultural marker — one that distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians. In 2021, Russians were promoting the narrative that “gender is a threat to national security.” Feminine job titles and the word “gender” irritated Russian audiences, which made it possible to guess whether a given media outlet was pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian.
“Russians have a concept called ‘the ecology of the Russian language.’ They claim that feminine job titles are a Western invention that has no place in Russian. That is precisely why feminitives are a marker that sets us apart from Russia,” said Larysa Kompantseva, a professor and doctor of philological sciences.
Olha Dunebabina, Strategic Communications Manager at La Strada Ukraine and a PhD in Philology, recalled that the use of feminine suffixes in professional titles was once labeled bourgeois nationalism and accused of undermining the unification of the Russian and Ukrainian languages.
“Today we are restoring words like pravnytsia [woman lawyer], profesorka [woman professor], and redaktorka [woman editor] to the language. And we are not simply following a linguistic trend — we are performing an act of linguistic restitution.
We are restoring women’s visibility in professions, a visibility that was stripped from them in Soviet terminological bulletins,” Dunebabina said.
Olena Kharytonova, gender policy adviser to the Minister of Education and Science, pointed out that disputes tend to arise specifically around feminine forms for high-ranking or authoritative positions and titles because women were simply not allowed to hold those roles in the past. No one questions the word prybyralnytsia (woman cleaner) — it is far more commonly heard than its masculine counterpart. Yet “professor” seems to many as though it can only refer to a man. Reality, however, tells a different story.
“If you have no name, you do not exist — or if you do exist, you do not matter much. To avoid androcentrism, two strategies are possible: the first is feminization — the consistent use of feminine job titles; the second is neutralization, where we use collective terms, common-gender words, and so on,” she said.
(Author’s note: In education, for example, collective terms such as studentstvo [students], uchnivstvo [pupils], and vykladatstvo [faculty] are already in use.)
Kateryna Levchenko stressed that the use of feminine job titles in official language is a fundamental and important issue for state policy development.
In 2024, the Ministry of Defense approved special methodological guidelines on gender-sensitive language in communications, with the use of feminine job titles as one of the key tools.
The State Emergency Service has also developed and adopted instructions on gender-sensitive language to highlight how significantly women are represented in those professions.
Member of Parliament Yevheniia Kravchuk said she sometimes corrects people when they refer to her using the masculine “Member of Parliament.” Thanks to her and other colleagues, the name of the national holiday Defenders’ Day was expanded to “Men and Women Defenders” — an important step toward making women’s role in the military visible.
“I would very much like to be officially referred to everywhere, as a woman, as the ‘Government Commissioner for Gender Policy’ in the feminine form — but in all official documents I appear as the masculine ‘government commissioner for gender policy,’ which, in my view, is a violation of my dignity,” Levchenko said.
She acknowledged that changing this approach, introducing feminine job titles into regulatory and legal documents, will require substantial work, and that work needs to begin now.
At the end of the meeting, participants proposed establishing a working group and suggested organizing various competitions and events to promote the Ukrainian language and the use of feminine job titles.
P.S:
For some reason, whenever the topic of feminine job titles comes up, the jokes start — mockery of words that supposedly “grate on the ear.” A favorite example is the word pilotka: in Ukrainian, pilot means a pilot, and the feminine form pilotka also happens to mean a type of military cap. I asked my seven-year-old son: “What is a pilotka?” Without hesitation, he answered: “A woman who works as a pilot.” A child who did not grow up in the Soviet Union has no association with the cap. For children, forming feminine job titles is entirely natural. If they are not untaught it at school, they will grow up and finally change all the legal documents that need changing. The occasional “funny-sounding” form should spark discussion and creative proposals — not become a reason to abandon feminine job titles altogether.
Author: Olena Kushchenko, journalist for Women in Media