Join us for the upcoming webinar organized by Task 3.6 Neology and Gender Equality in the Languages of Europe.

Maria Szymańska from the University of Lodz, Poland, will talk on November 18^th at 2:30 PM CET about Gendered neologisms and social transformation: What words like “mansplaining” and “girlboss” tell us about gender relations.

Bio: Maria Szymańska is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Lodz, Poland. Her research interests include lexical sociolinguistics, linguistic innovation and neologisms, and the representation of gender in language. She explores linguistic innovation as a social and cultural process, asking why particular expressions emerge, what meanings they acquire, and how they become meaningful to the communities that use them.

Abstract: Over the past decade, the English language has seen a proliferation of gendered expressions. We began hearing axiologically loaded lexemes such as “mansplaining” or “manspreading”, while women entrepreneurs were hailed “girlbosses” or “SheEOs”. These new expressions – gendered neologisms – add a gender marker to expressions that were previously neutral, or seemed to be. In this webinar, I will present a study of how such words arise in response to changing social realities, and how they take part in public debates about gender, identity and power. Drawing on a corpus-assisted analysis of journalistic and public discourse, the study looks at both how these neologisms are formed and how their meanings evolve over time. The findings show that gender-marking elements (e.g., man- and girl-) rarely function as neutral descriptors. Instead, they tend to carry metaphorical and evaluative meanings, rooted in cultural expectations and gender stereotypes. This study and its findings have also been discussed in my recently published book “Gendered Neologisms and Social Transformation” (Cambridge University Press, 2026).