The study aims to determine the features charactering the process of feminisation of the French lexis denoting professions. The article analyses the main ways of feminisation, semantics and stylistic colouring of lexical units. Scientific novelty of the study lies in conducting a comprehensive analysis and developing a classification of ways for forming new feminine units of the French lexis denoting professions. As a result, the researcher has identified the features and problems peculiar to feminisation of profession names which are related to both linguistic factors and the issues pertaining to women’s position in the French linguistic culture. It is proved that the predominant factors for the language phenomena being accepted as a linguistic norm are social conditions and frequency of using units in speech.