Stability and change in legislative drafting techniques in the UK legislation: a recent debate on gender-neutral language

Abstract

Gender-neutral (hereafter GN) language, also called non-sexist, gender-inclusive, or non-gender-specific language (UNESCO – Priority Gender Equality Guidelines 2011), refers to the language which includes words or expressions that cannot be taken to refer to one gender only (Oxford English Dictionary). The aim of this paper is to analyse the recent changes in the UK Public General Acts (Primary Legislation, hereafter PL, and Secondary Legislation, hereafter SL), focusing on the lexico-grammatical and discoursal strategies adopted by drafters over the last decades, who are asked to write legal sentences aiming at gender-fair and symmetric representation of men and women. Even though PL and SL are set up to form the UK Public General Acts, they are written according to different, though complementary, drafting techniques. For this reason, this analysis will concentrate on the legislation issued in the UK from 2008 and 2018, in order to identify any changes in the use of lexico-grammatical structures that might have diachronically occurred when referring to gender and, then, to ascertain any difference between PL and SL in their application of GN drafting techniques.