In pressing the case, activists have been met with everything from ridicule to outright contempt to condemnation for daring to not just insult the French language, but to take actions that threaten to undermine everything that it means to be French.

The politics of language is now as fraught as the politics of, well, politics. As acceptable language changes, so must we. Today, there is no tolerance for 'gendered' criticism of women, and thus, there must be no tolerance of gendered criticism of men. Words like "mansplaining" and "hepeats" have got to go. And claiming that male politicians without children don't have legitimate opinions on family issues is as sexist as saying a woman finds math hard.

Many of us who are youth sports coaches and parents tend to overlook the little things we say about what it means to be a man that can end up sending boys the wrong message, whether it's creating star athletes who feel entitled to abuse others (and who are excused for doing so), or falling into the Muscular Christianity trap that has defined sports (and overall culture, really) in the United States to determine male equals strong and tough, and female equals weak.

“It is clear that gender stereotypes in relation to certain roles are so entrenched, the market needs to take action to address this. Only by addressing the unconscious bias that still exists at the very start of a candidate search, can we move towards truly diverse workforces and make inroads in tacking major challenges like the Gender Pay Gap. “We hope both recruiters embrace the new Gender Bias Decoder and take the opportunity to do the ground work to help them avoid perpetuating the issues that April’s new legislation will seek to address.”

The algorithm is basing its translations on a huge corpus of human language, so it is merely reflecting a bias that already exists. In Estonian, Google Translate converts “[he/she] is a doctor” to “she,” so perhaps there is less cultural bias in that corpus.

The allocation of a specific gender to an object or feature of our landscape might not be a result of conceptual categorisation and this is supported by an examination of noun classes and "gender shifts" across different grammatical systems. Is a French car (female) different in any way to a Spanish (male) car or is it just a question of grammar without connotation or semantics?

Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.

"For a long time, I didn’t mind at all, but around the age of 30, it started to become a mild irritant. It is about age and context as much as it is about gender – to be called a “girl” in a work situation feels infantilising to me, because it’s a sign of an assumed imbalance of power. It makes me feel as if I’m not on an equal footing."

Speaking at the Girls’ School Association’s annual conference in Manchester, she said that she would “never walk into a room in an-all girls’ school and say girls or ladies” because it was “patronising”. She added: “I don’t think it is useful to be constantly reminded of your gender all the time and all the stereotypes that go with it.”

In a memo to his ministers on Tuesday, Philippe said: “The masculine [form] is a neutral form which should be used for terms liable to apply to women.” Stressing the need to use formal language in legally binding texts, he demanded government ministries avoid inclusive writing, “notably for reasons of intelligibility and clarity”`

The teachers’ objection was not just philosophical; it was philological. The rule, they said in the French version of Slate, was a parvenu (it was enunciated in the 17th century and became widely taught only in the 19th century) and politically motivated (it buttressed French laws that denied women equal rights). Besides that, they said, the rule encourages children “to accept the domination of one sex over the other” to the detriment of women.

In the 1980s, observers in the UK noted that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was frequently interrupted—so much so that researchers from the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex decided to investigate. Their conclusions, published in the journal Nature, were fascinating: Lady Thatcher, it turns out, was giving her interrogators a host of nonverbal cues. “We demonstrate here that many interruptions in an interview with Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, occur at points where independent judges agree that her turn appears to have finished,” the study noted. “It is suggested that she is unconsciously displaying turn-yielding cues at certain inappropriate points.”