Women's occupation: a diversity of views on the issue of feminitives

The article deals with a particular aspect of word usage. There are certain nouns that denote profession or job, nationality or place of residence, class or status. In the Russian language those terms that refer to women are usually derived with the help of certain suffixes from stem words of masculine gender, and are known as feminine nomina agentis, or feminitives. Since the interest in gender issues and equality of rights in this country increase, a lot has been said on the Internet in recent years about the emergence of new words, relating to females. In its turn, it has brought about an increase in articles on the subject, published in journals and conference proceedings. We have focused on newspaper articles, in which journalists interviewed associate professors with a degree in philology, to get an expert opinion on the use of feminitives, mostly newly-coined ones. Thus, the study materials may be considered as topical. We have shown that the issue is of dual nature, linguistic and social one, and falls within the domain of gender studies, socioliguistics, Russian philology, neology and word-building.