Gender-inclusive Language in Press Releases: A Corpus-based Analysis

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_36How to use a DOI?

Keywords

UNHCR Indonesia; Press Releases; Gender-inclusive Language

Abstract

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a world organization dedicated to protecting and defending the rights of refugees and stateless people. In communicating with the public, UNHCR publishes press releases on its website promoting gender equality as one of the goals in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to support the UN Women System-wide Strategy on Gender Parity. To promote gender parity, the UN publishes gender-inclusive guidelines on how to use epicene pronoun, suffix, pronoun, working title, gender-neutral word, and social title in publication. The study explores the utilization of gender-inclusive language in UNHCR Indonesia press releases and examines whether UNHCR Indonesia follows the UN guidelines to promote gender equality. This corpus-based research analyzes a corpus of 19 press releases consisting of 13,227 tokens from UNHCR Indonesia official website and employs AntConc 3.5.9 for key-word-in-context examination. The results show that epicene pronoun they is the most frequent pronoun used, occurring 119 times in the corpus. In contrast, the epicene pronoun he is used 27 times while the combined use of he or she is absent in the data. Moreover, inclusive language is evident in the utilization of gender-neutral terms such as refugees, children, and person with 433 appearances or 97.30% of the total instances. Conversely, terms associated with the female gender are used 5 times (1.12%), and male-specific terms are used 7 times (1.57%). The data showcase the active commitment of UNHCR Indonesia in employing gender-inclusive language in its press releases.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Madina Atvia Nindar
AU  - Tri Nuraniwati
AU  - Lisa Rahim
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/28
TI  - Gender-inclusive Language in Press Releases: A Corpus-based Analysis
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of Research on Language 2025 (IROLE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 479
EP  - 492
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_36
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_36
ID  - Nindar2026
ER  -