Abstract
How do terminology science and gender meet? They usually don’t. Terminology science studies concepts and their representations in specific domains or subjects (Drewer & Schmitz, 2017, pp. 5-6). In this regard, gender is considered a property and not a characteristic and should therefore play a subordinate role in the naming process of a term (Winter, 2021, p. 29). However, the current debate on gender-inclusive agentives, linguistic forms that indicate an agent, such as job titles, professions, educational qualifications, and roles, which represent the entire gender identity spectrum, including genderqueer people, calls for a reflection on how to store agentives in a terminology database. Based on investigations we conducted over the last three years, we outline the complexity of this topic, while focusing on the classification of agentives and on the strategies to represent them in terminology databases using examples in German from the legal context. Furthermore, we illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches used.