Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them. Most recommend creating feminine versions of all professional nouns and/or using neutral nouns whenever possible. Many also recommend a grammatical tool that consists of adding a “median-period” at the end of masculine nouns, followed by the feminine ending, thus indicating both gendered versions of every noun (like musicien·ne·s, which would read as “male musicians and female musicians”). Some have even recommended creating a gender-neutral pronoun (the equivalent of how “they” is sometimes used in English, or “hen” in Sweden). These and other recommendations have collectively become known as “inclusive writing.”

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.

Proponents of linguistic determinism argue that your language determines and constrains what you’re capable of thinking. Linguistic determinism is the strong flavor of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—the idea that your language influences how you think. This hypothesis was popular in the 1940s, but it was deemed incorrect by the linguistic community in the 60s and 70s. “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” argued linguist Roman Jakobson. It’s not that speaking French makes it impossible for you to conceive of something as gender-neutral, he suggested, but that the language forces you to think often in gendered terms. Whereas in English you can say “I’m having dinner with my friend” without indicating whether the friend is male or female, in French you have to indicate—and therefore think about—the friend’s gender by using either a female or male noun. Today, some still believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it enjoyed some popular attention last year after being featured in the movie Arrival.

Some scientific research does seem to suggest that gendered languages like French lead to more sexist perceptions than gender-neutral ones like English. But those studies are limited in that they can’t control for outside factors like culture, which are extremely important in determining sexist attitudes.

In France, this debate traces its roots back to World War I, when men went to war and left women behind to fill traditionally male-dominated positions like chimney sweep or factory worker. The nouns referring to those professions, which previously only had masculine versions, developed feminine ones, to the great horror of French society at the time. But what was tolerable in wartime became unacceptable when men returned from the battlefield, and the question of how to make French gender-neutral was sidelined until the 1970s and ’80s. Efforts at the governmental level to study the possible feminization of French began in 1984 and continued throughout the end of the 20th century, but all proposals were rejected by the institutions that control the codification of the language.