I'm discussing the problem with saying "female" when you mean to say "woman" with a group of good people at work. However, some of them think the biggest problem with "female" is that it's an adjective while "woman" is a noun.
I think the bigger problem is that "female" is sex, and "woman" is gender, and you should never say e.g. "a female developer" when you really mean to say a developer is a woman.
Thoughts? Personal feelings are appreciated, DM if you like, I will keep everyone anonymous.
@alice Absolutely! Thanks 🙂
@zigg Np. That's an interesting point you're discussing. Sounds like we should be using women as the adjective instead. Women developers. Linguists can cringe but it seems more respectful now that you bring this up.
@alice That's what I tend to do, yeah. It sounds even weirder when you say "man developer"—I guess I'm used to "woman developer" now?—but I think it's worthwhile to emphasize that we almost always want to talk about gender in the workplace, not sex.
@alice @zigg I've been exploring this myself. "Female" as noun is right out. But I've been testing "female developer" vs. "woman developer," as I say them. I was a prescriptivist for a long time, but I like the social implication of the latter enough to try to switch over.
And "man developer," well that's an existing asymmetry. Like Wikipedia's lists of "authors" and "female authors" a few years ago and so on. We need to get away from cis/het/white/male as the default person, but it's not easy.
@gannet @alice @zigg @naga heard/read the term "male nurse" occasionally (usually from early 1970s era content) but for all of my lifetime (born 1972) its been accepted in UK librarians can be any gender as can nurses and healthcare assistants (and for tech jobs). there are in fact quite a few women in tech, but tend to be older and in quality control/management/compliance rôles which I think is also a big source of the pushback from younger males who have to obey them in a work environment!
its classed as "outdated terminology" for both nationalised and private run healthcare operations here (I work in tech for healthcare) but is very still occasionally used (one context might be where name duplication occurs with an "androgynous" given name and one staff member is a nurse and the other an HCA). Then again I still use "matron" for a senior (female) nurse (even on here) when the "PC" term is "lead nurse" or "head of care"
another factor might be that in everyday speech "girl" and "woman" have an "age" attached to them, and in todays culture often everyone wants to be young (in the same context groups of men will use the term "lads" of "boys" even when all of them are well into middle age) and similarly women often refer to a "girls night out" when they are grown adults - "male" and "female" being strict biological terms might sound more awkward but also avoids this "age" label.
@naga @vfrmedia @zigg @alice in the years around 1990, feminist student thought was that we were women a 18. I was content to have been a girl until then.
I think “young women” would be preferable to “female youth". I don’t know what the current thought is on the matter, though. I just know that I wouldn’t ever have thought of myself as a female youth.
@zigg likely dumb question: assuming there's at least one woman in the group, did you ask her what her opinion is?
@zigg Most of my time on Hellbird, whenever I saw people refer to women as "females" it's usually been some turdbro who probably thinks allowing women to vote was a mistake
In that context it more often than not brings up mental images of the Ferengi and how they practically treat women like cattle. 😕
@Jo Yeah, that's another really important reason to avoid the word—it was never great in the first place, but it's also been in the mouths of some pretty awful people.
In the specific case that led to this discussion, there was a well-meaning article listing "influential female developers"—so it didn't come from the same place, but it's a loaded word because of experiences like yours.
@zigg female is not sex either, when applied to humans, it's just reducing to animal level, it's demeaning
if you have to talk about genitalia, you use XX-typical and XY-typical, otherwise there's no reason to even bring up sex in the first place, so don't do it
use of gender is also generally discouraged, but if you must, use girl and boy
so yeah, you're right
@Efi Thanks for that. Excellent points—there really is no good reason to be mentioning sex at all.
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts.
@zigg meow! <3
Agree. It is irksome and occasionally sexist.
@zigg I'm not a woman but one reason I will avoid using the word "female" is that it sounds so very scientific and condescending. As if I'm talking about a subject/object instead of a human.
And there's a kind of misogyny and power imbalance built into that kind of language.
The points you raise are also important to take note of, I appreciate your sort of carving a space for this type of discussion.
@sonicbooming Definitely. I've heard some women say "female" reduces them to the ability to bear children. That's definitely *not* what we're going for here.
I'm very happy to be having this discussion. I've been trying to be a bit better at speaking up on these sorts of things lately; this time was a success. 🙂
Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄
@zigg Tangentially: you mentioned a list of "influential female developers". That's a trend we should probably get away from. The people doing it think they have good motives, but (with rare exceptions) these lists do two things:
* broadcast "look how woke we are"; and
* normalize women needing their own list.
If you're going to make lists of influential <whatever>, it's better to simply make sure your list represents the field's actual demographics, with a bias toward including minorities.
@noelle It does certainly merit treading very cautiously—it would be very sad if we ended up de facto "separate but equal".
@zigg
The problem is "a female," no noun. That's like saying "a black," "a gay," or "a disabled." You're simplifying down to a single politically charged characteristic in order to single the person out as "other." It's ungrammatical, because English is not good at nounifying adjectives. But that's icing.
I have no problem being called a female writer, or a Jewish person, or even a bisexual nerd. In fact, I prefer "female writer" to "woman writer", or G-d forbid "authoress."
@DialMforMara Thanks for sharing your thoughts. So if I understand you correctly, you want to keep "female" (or "Jewish" or "bisexual") as a secondary characteristic—and beyond that, you prefer "female" because it actually *is* an adjective, where "woman" isn't?
@zigg Grammaticality is a secondary question. It does inform what sounds right to me, but I don’t think that’s the point. My main problem with “woman writer” is that this is a phrasing that’s been historically used to *other* professional women. And it may be that “female writer” is going that way too. But I’m not ready to give up on it yet, because I don’t know what it’s going to be replaced by, and I need a concise way to say “a writer who happens to identify as female.”
@DialMforMara @zigg Authornatrix?
@DialMforMara @zigg I tried to think up the scariest, most badass word I could.
@zigg Your co-workers argument is the one that exists in most traditional newsroom style manuals. As a reporter and writer, I always balked at the word "female" because I felt like we didn't use "male" with the same frequency. Like "male" was the norm, so "female" was used to indicate deviations from the norm.
@zigg I have somehow avoided ever saying either word, and I've been in a supervisor role for years where I work. :P
@zigg May I boot this?