Gender-inclusive language is an important issue in the struggle for political equality between women and men. Parliaments are an important site in this struggle as they both reflect and shape gender-relations in society. Based on a novel high-quality corpus of all its debates we study the evolution of gender-fair language in the German parliament, Bundestag, between 1949 and 2021. As a "gender language" with a grammatical gender, German offers ideal conditions to inspect semantically symmetric male and female forms of personal nouns. Our analysis of more than 2.5 million occurrences of 1,600 lemmas of personal nouns reveals that female forms had been virtually non-existent in debates before experiencing a dramatic increase since the 1980s. This evolution in language use has been induced by the gender, partisan affiliation and generational affiliation of MPs.

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