Linguistics, as one of the last academic disciplines in the US to adopt guidelines for gender-inclusive language (Thorne 1998), has not been in the forefront of the analysis of language and gender. Indeed, it has been slow to give – either to the social context of language use, or to the socially constructed concept of gender – the kind of serious analytic consideration that it regularly gives to the mental representation of language. This collection of articles edited by Bergvall, Bing & Freed signals a change within the profession itself in its re-examination of basic concepts to be taken into account in future research on language and gender.