Better Female

Better Female

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I t’s a debate that has raged on since the dawn of time: which is better — male or female? Through the years, I’ve just accepted it’s the luck of the draw which one you end up with. Well, no more.
Aided by some sweet and sticky research this past weekend, the debate about which is superior and more desirable has finally been resolved. Depending on what part of the country you’re from, you may come up with a different conclusion, and that’s okay.
But in our house, it was almost unanimous: females are sweeter and much better than males. Guess which one of us disagreed with all the rest?
With July 4th being only a week away, we are planning an outdoor cookout. Aside from hot dogs, hamburgers, and chips, the star of any summertime meal is the watermelon. Living in the South all my life, the cooling-off effects and sheer fun of watermelon are unparalleled. But which one do you buy?
They come in many different sizes, colors, some with brown spots, some without, and yes, even different sexes. For our research, we only concentrated on the two most common melons we’ve all eaten as kids: round vs. long.
Growing up back on Flamingo Street, we kids knew it was the official start of summer when one of us kids picked out watermelons. Even though Dad had a huge garden in the backyard during those seven years we lived on Flamingo, he only grew watermelons once.
“Vines go everywhere. Takes up too much room.” Instead, he always took us to the State Farmer’s Market. It was tradition.
Another tradition was the big argument during the half-hour drive. We’d fight over which melon would be the best and which one of us would pick it out. By the time we reached the market, it was decided each of us five kids would pick out our own melon.
For us kids, the open-air Farmer’s Market seem to stretch forever with aisle after aisle of farmers unloading their trucks into their display area. To me, the busy farmers resembled ants scurrying over a piece of candy dropped in their ant hill.
Like a multi-color sea, each booth held every kind of produce from the garden, and all had a display of watermelons and cantaloupes. Dad allowed each one of us to pick out our own melon, educating us on the difference.
“The long male ones are full of water; the small round green ones are the sweetest. They’re the females and are loaded with the best spitting seeds. But the round black ones are the best because they’re sweet, juicy, and have deep red firm meat on the inside. For all melons, a large yellow splotch on the bottom is very important because it means the melon has been on the ground for a long time and that makes it sweeter. And the stem needs to be intact, dry and brown, but not green. Green means it was picked too early. Make sure you ‘thump’ the melon and pick it up. A deep sounding thump and heavy melon means it’s nice and juicy. And whatever you do, stay away from those seedless ones. They’re just mealy on the inside and have little taste.”
Dad never paid for our six melons (six because we always dropped one before getting back to the car). Instead, he swapped extra produce from his garden. His prolific garden kept us in watermelons all summer long. Each of those seven summers spent growing up on Flamingo was filled with endless cold watermelon fun.
For us, unless you had the sticky juice from watermelon running down the front of your shirt as you try to out spit seeds at your siblings, it just wasn’t summer.
A grand seed-spitting contest is something we did with the Girly Girls, and during our recent melon research, The Wife also took part in our taste test. Unlike us, she’s fonder of the long watermelons because on the inside the melon is white near the rind — the round melons are red. When she told me this, I smiled, “So you like the male ones the best?”
The Wife replied, “Actually, while they’re female and male flowers on the vine, watermelons only come from the female flower. That means all watermelons are female. Some are just sweeter than others.”
I gave her a kiss and said, “Some females are much sweeter than others. Now that’s something we can both agree on, my love.”
[Rick Ryckeley has been writing stories since 2001.]
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The uncomfortable reason, and painful truth we hate to accept...
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Over the past decades, scientific studies have consistently shown that on most of the key traits that make leaders more effective, women tend to outperform men . For example, humility , self-awareness , self-control , moral sensitivity , social skills , emotional intelligence , kindness , a prosocial and moral orientation , are all more likely to be found in women than men.
Women also outperform men in educational settings , while men score higher than women on dark side personality traits , such as aggression (especially unprovoked ), narcissism , psychopathy , and Machiavellianism , which account for much of the toxic and destructive behaviors displayed by powerful men who derail: #metoo, the 2008 financial crisis , poor handling of the current pandemic , and white collar crime under the “greed is good” mantra (for an evolutionary perspective on this see Peter Turchin’s excellent book ).
Narcissistic leaders are too focused on themselves to care about others, psychopathic leaders are cruel and immoral, lack empathy and engage in reckless risk taking, and Machiavellian leaders will engage in callous manipulation and exploit their charisma and social skills to take advantage of their followers and subordinates. And of course, research shows that men have bigger egos , which may be one of least counterintuitive findings in the history of science.
All this may explain meta-analytic studies showing that, on average, women are more likely to lead democratically , show transformational leadership, be a role model , listen to others and develop their subordinates’ potential, and score higher on measures of leadership effectiveness (though when leadership archetypes are “masculine”, and followers are mostly male, men are still rated higher than women on leadership). If you think these differences defy cultural stereotypes, think again. In fact, people are broadly aware of the female advantage in leadership, which I discuss in detail in my latest book . Gallup data suggests that in 1953, 66% of Americans preferred a male boss - today the figure is 23%. As my colleague Avivah Wittenberg-Cox recently noted , “The mountain of evidence keeps growing. Women leaders outperform. Especially during a crisis. Companies with more of them do better. Countries led by women are managing the Covid crisis better than their male counterparts.”
An obvious question therefore arises: if women have more potential for leadership, then why are they still the minority group among leaders? Well, the answer is rather obvious: because we don’t really select leaders on the basis of their actual potential, talent, or competence. If we did, then we wouldn’t just have more women leaders, but more female than male leaders. And if we did, then the average performance of leaders would not be as poor as it is today . The painful truth is that feminism is a data-driven bias, whereas sexism is self-destructive. This is why, according to McKinsey , the world’s GDP is $12 trillion lower today than it would be if we advanced towards gender equality. According to the World Bank , gender inequality is costing us $23,620 per person in lost earnings, and $160 trillion in human capital loss (twice the global GDP). So, instead of optimizing our world for progress, wealth, and fairness, we choose to perpetuate a status quo that benefits those who are in charge. To the surplus of men who arrived to the top not because of merit, but because of privilege, deception, or greed, gender equality is like the Turkey voting for Christmas.
We live in a sham meritocracy , where we pretend to pick the best person for each job, while simply picking those we prefer: and when the jobs pay well, they are still overwhelming male. Our preferences are based on style rather than substance , so we pick individuals for leadership on the basis of their confidence rather than competence, charisma rather than humility, and narcissism rather than integrity. For every Angela Merkel, there are many Silvio Berlusconis, Jair Bolsonaros, and Donald Trumps. Not just in politics, but also in business, the typical leader is not known for their humility or competence, but arrogance and incompetence.
And yet, men continue to ask for the “business case” for women in leadership, while ignoring all these data. And as Unilever’s CHRO, Leena Nair , rightly asked: “What about the business case for men?” Since most leaders are men, we are awash in data to answer this question: the fact that 87% of employees are not engaged or disengaged at work, and that the number one reason for this is their boss, with 65-75% of employees reporting that the worst part of their job is their boss; that roughly 1 in 2 people distrust their leaders, and at least 50% (but probably more like 75%) of leaders will end up disappointing; that 65% of leaders stress or alienate their employees; or that 70% of Americans would be happy to take a pay cut if someone would fire their boss... all these facts and many other data on the dismal performance of most leaders, tells you everything you need to know about the “ROI” of male leadership. Just Google “my boss is...” to see what the business case for our current leadership choices looks like , and explain to any rational person why we are still picking men over women.
So, instead of blaming women for not “leaning in” , we should stop falling for people (usually men) who lean in when they don’t have the talents to back it up . What would happen if we spent less time telling women to be more confident , and more time picking leaders on actual competence ? We would not just improve leadership quality, but also gender equality. And in the process, we would make it a lot harder for narcissistic and psychopathic men to thrive. As Bloomberg’s Sarah Green Carmichael noted, equality isn’t exceptional women getting ahead, it is incompetent men falling behind.

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'Female' doctor? 'Lady' lawyer? 'Woman' politician? Are any of these not offensive?
Love words? Need even more definitions?

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Here at Merriam-Webster, we have a number of women editors. Or is it female editors ? Certainly not lady editors , right?
There's currently a split between the use of 'woman' and 'female' as modifiers, with some preferring one over the other. If you're stuck, consider that there's rarely a need to say something like 'female surgeon'; most of the time, 'surgeon' works just fine.
Gendered modifiers like female , woman , and lady are a thorny issue in English usage. All three words began life as nouns, with woman and lady showing up very early in the language, and female showing up in the 1300s. Lady was used initially as a form of address for a woman who had run of a household or who had charge over servants, and late came to refer to a woman who held a high rank. Woman has retained its original meaning, which is now almost 1400 years old: “an adult female human being.” Female first referred to a woman or girl, but within about a hundred years of its appearance, it was also being used of animals (“Byrdes that ben femalles may not abyde there,” — The Myrrour of the Worlde , 1481). Unlike lady and woman , however, female is also a full-fledged adjective, and the adjectival use has historically been more clinical and biological than not (as in, “the female plant” or Alexander Pope’s “goats of female kind”). There was remarkably little fussing over any of these words. Until the end of the 1800s, that is.
The arguments began with the bare nouns: was it appropriate to call a group of women females ? Are all women ladies? Can you call a group of female human beings of various ages females or should you go with ladies or women ? Though advice varied, it was generally agreed by the beginning of the 20th century that female was a disparaging term as it made no differentiation between humans and animals (this in spite of the fact that female was, in previous centuries, actually preferred to woman and lady ); lady was a fine and polite word to describe a woman of excellent social refinement or breeding (in spite of the fact that it was, at that point in time, often used in informal print and speech to refer specifically to women who happened to have jobs that would benefit from being tagged as above their station, as with cleaning lady and saleslady ); and woman was the preferred term to refer to an adult woman (which had always been the case).
All three nouns had been used attributively (that is, before a noun in order to modify it) before— woman , in fact, had been used attributively back to the 14th century. Newspapers from the 1800s are surprisingly populated with lady doctors , female lawyers , and women scientists . And these uses went largely unremarked upon until the 20th century.
The first scholar to critically examine the attributive uses of female , woman , and lady was Henry Fowler, author of the 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage , and while his conclusions are commonsensical, his manner of expressing himself grates. In a section called “Feminine designations,” he claims that women who argue against the use of gendered words ending in -ess , like authoress and poetress , are being, in short, whiny and illogical, and that since the English language is flexible enough to allow these designations, we had better let it. There is one interesting note in his jeremiad, however:
With the coming extension of women’s vocations, feminine vocation-words are a special need of the future; everyone knows the inconvenience of being uncertain whether a doctor is a man or a woman;...
For all his late Victorian bluster, Fowler was prescient in one regard: most of our current uses of gendered modifiers are vocation-related ( lady doctor, woman senator, female restaurateur ). And he has some usage guidance on that score. Regarding lady , he writes:
Lady prefixed to names of vocations as a mark of sex ( lady doctor, author, clerk , &c.) is a cumbrous substitution for a feminine designation, which should be preferred when it exists or can be made; in default of that, woman or female would be better than lady ...
But Fowler had some further thoughts on female and woman . After noting that the noun female had become “reasonably resented” as mostly a biological designation, he goes on to say that
It is not reasonable to extend this resentment to the adjective use of female ; but it is the mistaken extension which probably accounts for the apparent avoidance of the natural phrase female suffrage & the use of the clumsy woman suffrage instead.
His preference for female over woman seems to be grammatical in nature: he notes that shoehorning woman (a noun) into an adjective’s role is “mere perversity” when there’s a perfectly good adjective to use instead: female .
Fowler set the tone for the conversation that would take off in the latter part of the 20th century. Linguists and scholars who studied gendered language have, over decades, formulated the general rule we currently function under. Lady as a modifier is disparaging at best and should be avoided:
...if, in a particular sentence, both woman and lady might be used, the use of the latter tends to trivialize the subject matter under discussion, often subtly ridiculing the woman involved. — Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries , 1975
When choosing between female and woman as modifiers, the usage advice is split. Some advocate for woman :
Although it is generally preferable to use woman or women as adjectives...
but allow that female is also an adequate choice:
... there will be times when female seems more appropriate. Use it, however, only when you would use male in a similar situation or when it is necessary for clarification; sex-specific adjectives are often gratuitous and belittling... — Rosalie Maggio, The bias-free word finder: a dictionary of nondiscriminatory language , 1992
In her book, Lakoff uses female as the gendered modifier of choice, even going so far as to double-gendering with the construction “female comediennes” at one point.
Some of the preference for female over woman is a holdover of Fowler’s grammar point: female is an adjective while woman is not:
As far as the Guardian style guide is concerned, it is simply wrong to use "woman” and “wo
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