The use of masculine morphology to refer to all genders, often referred to as the ‘generic’ masculine, is common amongst natural and grammatical gender (g-gender) languages. Its use is widespread and can be seen across various language families. Previously, this was seen as unproblematic and often used for efficiency. Recently however, there has been a surge in the literature exploring the implications of the use of masculine generics on the representation and perception of women. These studies show that g-gender plays a major role in mediating gender expectations and representation (Gygax et al., 2008; Sato et al., 2016; Keith et al., 2022). Thus far this research has been relatively limited to ‘Western’ contexts. This study aims to extend this research to Arabic, as research on the effect of g-gender remains relatively understudied.

The study is centred around four key questions: (1) What kind of language is being used in recruitment in Egypt and is it strictly and consistently masculine? (2) How does morphological gender-marking affect perception and gendered occupational expectations? Specifically investigating the role morphological gender marking plays in either entrenching or mitigating gendered occupational expectations. (3) How does this language affect the perceived employability of women applicants? (4) What are the emergent inclusive strategies out there and are they successful?

To answer these questions, I used a variation of computational, experimental, quantitative, and qualitative methods. The study naturally followed 4 phases. (1) A large-scale web-scrape of all recruitment advertisements available online. (2) A novel speech elicitation task based on an adaptation of the board game Taboo to investigate how morphological gender-marking affects perception and gendered occupational expectations. (3) A hiring simulation experiment (2x2 (applicant’s gender and language condition) between-participants design) that included multiple employability measures and a measure for wage expectation. (4) A mixture of surveys and interviews to explore explores the emergent inclusive strategies being used in Arabic their success (in terms of frequency of use and attitudes towards them).

The findings show that (1) Most jobs advertised in Egypt are advertised strictly in the masculine, and that this is more pronounced for managerial and senior positions. (2) Role nouns in masculine g-gender almost exclusively prime male expectations regardless of role stereotypicality. (3) Inclusive language for role nouns promotes the retrieval of feminine-inflected words. However, this effect is not found to be consistent across gendered occupational stereotypes. (4) Women (applicants) were associated with lower ratings, wage expectations, and were less likely to be recommended for the job in the masculine g-gender condition (relative to men) by Egyptian recruiters. These findings outline the importance of incorporating inclusive language in recruitment (where women are already disadvantaged in Egypt) and other formal communication, such as that in education or law.