To the question of androcentrism of the grammatical category of gender in Italian language

The article analyses the processes of feminisation of some nouns occurring in the Italian language in connection with the struggle against the manifestations of masculine mentality. The asymmetry of feminine and masculine genders in the declension of nouns and adjectives is fixed in the Italian language at the grammatical level. However, in recent decades, due to the growth of feminist sentiments in the world and the increasing attention to social gender, this grammatical norm has caused more and more disputes in Italian society, the use of the masculine gender is undergoing a kind of gender censorship. The established gender hierarchy of language has been perceived by some politicians and cultural figures as incorrect, disadvantaging the representation of women in discourse, especially when it comes to the so-called "nomi di ruolo" - nouns denoting staff positions (mayor, councillor, chairman, prime minister, judge). Gender markers, which are natural for the language, receive additional connotative meaning, their semantic significance expands: along with the grammatical category, they begin to express the speaker's social position, his views on the political agenda in relation to feminist sentiments. The paper will examine gender in Italian as a grammatical category, then highlight the main grammatical tools that Italian linguists propose to use in order to equalise the asymmetry of femininity and masculinity in modern Italian. Different perspectives of native Italian speakers on such grammatical changes in the category of gender will be presented and possible options for levelling the asymmetry towards androcentrism will be analysed.