Our contribution is the adaptation to Italian of the study conducted on French by Richy and Burnett in 2021 with the aim to answer two research questions: (i) To what extent does the cultural bias influence the interpretation of a gender-neutral nominal expression? (ii) Can masculine nouns designating definite, specific individuals be interpreted as referring to either a man or a woman? Our results show that neutralized nominals are interpreted according to the gender bias, while masculine nominals are interpreted as just referring to men. This indicates that in Italian, masculine role nouns do not refer to women and that neutralizing a gender language does not contrast gender inequalities.