Gender in multilingual databases:: A closer look at EuroWordNet

One effect of "linguistic globalization" is an increased development of multilingual databases. In their own way, these resources reconstruct gender. The present study deals with the representation of sex and gender in EuroWordNet, a European multilingual database. Each "Man" and "woman" entity is analyzed with regard to its semantic representation, its hierarchies of meaning, and its most frequent "attributes". The authors' proposed changes are aimed at encouraging multilingual databases to take into account academic research on sexism in language.