Updating constitutions: Mind your genders

The itch to update gendered language in old constitutions has spread from Ireland to Spain.

Its deputy prime minister and equality minister, Carmen Calvo, has asked the Real Academia Española — the official arbiter of Spanish — to look at rewriting the country’s post-Franco constitution to meet the 21st-century quest for “inclusive” language, her problem being that nouns such as “ministers” and “deputies” take the male gender making, she says, women invisible.