Breaking Down Linguistic Equality in Hebrew

In recent years, there has been a growing trend to express the aspiration for gender equality in the linguistic realm as well, and to emphasize women in Hebrew language intentionally.

The necessary solution is gender-neutral language (לשון סתמית) - forms that are free of grammatical gender, for both males and females alike. However, as is known, the Hebrew language lacks grammatical gender.

At the base of Hebrew, like its sister Semitic languages, is a division into two grammatical genders - masculine and feminine. The grammatical gender is expressed in most verb forms, in adjectives, and in pronouns. Even nouns that lack biological gender can have a grammatical gender (for example, "sky" - masculine, "earth" - feminine). Except for some cases such as forms and pronouns in the first person (I, we, mine, me, our, wrote, wrote, I will write, we will write, and the pronoun that implies many of these or those), Hebrew does not provide us with grammatically gender-neutral forms (or forms with a grammatical gender that is neutral, such as neutrum in Latin).