The male bias can be attenuated in reading: on the resolution of anaphoric expressions following gender-fair forms

Despite the increased use of different types of gender-fair forms in French, studies investigating their interpretation in context remain few. To fill this gap, we conducted a pre-registered study using a timed sentence evaluation task to examine speakers' possibilities to establish an anaphoric relationship between a gendered anaphoric expression (women or men) and non-stereotyped role nouns as antecedents. The antecedents were presented in their masculine form or in one out of three different gender-fair forms (complete double forms: les voisines et voisins, contracted double forms: les voisin·es, or gender-neutral forms: les locataires). In line with previous findings, the masculine form led to a male bias in the participants’ mental representations of gender. All three examined gender-fair forms resolved this bias, but comparisons of the different forms to each other revealed differences between them. The findings show that complete double forms lead to equally balanced mental representations of gender while contracted double forms slightly favour representation of women. Finally, gender-neutral forms result in a small male bias, although significantly smaller than the one produced by the masculine form. The results are discussed in relation to the mental models theory and provide new and important insights on how gender-fair forms in French are interpreted.