Female Vs Female

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Female vs. Women: On Writing Adjectives, Nouns, And Inclusive Language
If I criticize someone’s work, how I choose to do so is a matter of words (and tone and body language, if in person; for now we’ll focus on just the language part). My choices will greatly alter the way the other person will feel about my criticism, perhaps even about me. Much of the effect may not be intentional or deliberate on my part, but if I choose my words carelessly* it is more likely to result in a negative effect, and that’s of no use to anyone.
The same is true in general writing, and that’s where today’s subject comes in: when to use “female” and when to use “woman” (or women).
This is not a new discussion; it is simply ongoing. In 2008 Mignon Fogarty a.k.a. Grammar Girl wrote an important piece on Woman versus Female, and in 2014, Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu of BuzzFeed wrote 6 Reasons You Should Stop Referring To Women As “Females” Right Now. The topic resurfaced for me, personally, when someone recently tried to tell me that “female engineer” was a trans-exclusive way to describe women who are engineers.
(“Tried”: The disconnect came from the fact that I view “female” as not referencing someone’s biological sex unless explicitly stated that way, but purely as the adjectival form for women; they did not know that, nor share that view; none of this was articulated at the time.)
Accepting the biological sex baggage that comes from using “female” as an adjective (like in “female engineer”), it creates a rather difficult situation. If female as adjective for women is trans-exclusive, and we want to write inclusive language that does not make anyone feel alienated or excluded, we are left with no possible adjectival use for women.
First of all, “woman” and “women” are nouns, plain and simple. The phrase “women engineers” is so grammatically bad it is my—and many others’—version of nails on a chalkboard. You never see it used for men, either. “Men engineers”? Men doctors? Men nurses? It just highlights how crass it is.
More importantly, it’s offensive and demeaning to all women, from a purely linguistic point of view, to reduce the noun of woman/women to an adjective. Linguistically it strips women of personhood, of agency, and reduces them to an attribute for something else. It’s the grammar and language equivalent of defining a woman solely through her relationship to a man, i.e. “Amal Alamuddin is George Clooney’s wife.”
(Aside: you could still use female to describe a group of biologically female women, but the phrase “women women” makes no sense.)
There is no widespread agreement on this; there are incredibly smart feminist women who disagree completely with this premise, who prefer the (in my opinion far more dehumanizing) “women engineers” and find the use of female as adjective (though grammatically correct) more othering, more exclusionary. I am not writing this to convince them otherwise; that’d be an outrageous effort, to try and redefine how someone experiences a term.
What I am writing this for is to articulate why I find myself at a crossroads where neither option seems palatable anymore. Where I feel I’ve exhausted my ability to find common ground and bring consensus to a sensitive topic.
This is a common problem for people who genuinely and actively care about how their words impact others, and wish to continually improve their behaviors to be more inclusive and less alienating. Many others would have long stopped giving a damn by now. I don’t fault them, although I do encourage everyone to keep learning and improving on everything in life.
Part of this problem is the English language itself. Many other languages have very different circumstances when it comes to gender; from enforcing it much more strictly to not having a concept of gender in the language at all.
English, specifically, has been shaped for centuries through patriarchal influences that normalize a default-male perspective, leading to any use of female or woman as adjectival specificity to stand out and feel exceptional. We can say “a doctor” and more people will imagine a man rather than a woman. We don’t have to say “a male doctor” for that to happen, but we do say “a female doctor” to highlight the womanhood of the medical practitioner. An exception to the norm.
Absent the ability to change the third-most common language in the world, I’m left to feel like a clumsy compromise is my personal best solution.
I will continue the practice of avoiding gendering things altogether as much as possible. This leaves only the exceptional case where you are deliberately trying to discuss only the women in a topic, such as the tweet that restarted this whole discussion for me:
To make that tweet more inclusive without using either female or woman as adjective, I would now write:
“How to recruit more women for engineering positions?”
It will be clumsy at first to no longer use either (or any) term as adjective anywhere, but I think in the end I will find it a more enjoyable outcome. I tried rewriting some text (of my own and others’) to stop using adjectives altogether, and found that it discourages using gender as an adjective for specificity altogether. As a result, it elevated the gendered term (meaning the person or people) to a subject in the sentence, and reduced the role to the qualifier instead.
Like many of these roadblocks to greater inclusivity, there will be some who balk at the suggested change, some who embrace it, and some who will never even read this far down the article. I’d love to hear from you, those of you still reading this: what approach do you plan on taking, and why?
* It is a privilege to be able to choose your words carelessly, have them cause harm or alienation to others, and get away with it without repercussions.
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First, we had Nancy Pelosi taking over as Speaker of the House, then Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee, and now Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. So the question of word choice is rising again—Is Hillary Clinton the first female presidential nominee from a major party or the first woman nominee?
Before I answer the question, I want to address a related issue, which is that sometimes it's sexist to point out people's sex because doing so implies that they aren't in their proper role. For example, saying someone is a male nurse or a female doctor wrongly implies that it's so unusual for men to be nurses or so unusual for women to be doctors that you have to make a big deal out of it. But, given that Hillary Clinton actually is the first woman to ever be a presumptive candidate for president of the United States from one of the two main parties, it’s not sexist to talk about it because it is, in fact, a big deal. It’s historic. It’s an important part of the story.
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So then, what is the best way to talk about Hillary Clinton being a woman? The words woman and man are primarily nouns, and to say someone is a woman nominee is placing woman in an adjective position. I checked four different dictionaries, and two don't include woman as an adjective (1, 2), one does (3), and the fourth said that when woman is used in the adjective position it's actually an appositive noun and it’s in the process of becoming an adjective (4). So the dictionaries don't give us a clear, definitive answer.
Testing the validity of the sentence by seeing how it sounds to substitute the word man for woman seems like a good way to see if the sentence makes sense. To me it sounds terribly awkward to say someone is the first man nominee. I imagine most of you would say He's the first male nominee, if the need arose.
So, even though some sources say it's grammatically correct to use woman as an adjective, my opinion is that you should say Hillary Clinton is the first female Democratic presidential nominee.
If for some reason the word female makes you uncomfortable, you can use woman as a noun, saying she is the first woman to be the party’s presidential nominee.
With a perfectly acceptable adjective like female available, I don't see any reason to push the word woman into the role. But what about female as a noun?
Now on the flip side, Liz from Austin, Texas, called in to say her pet peeve is when people refer to women as females—for example, when someone says, “I was chatting to some females.” To her, that sounds very scientific and awkward.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes that esteemed authors in the 1800s used female in this way. And those authors were women.
Jane Austen used the phrase "the females of the family" in Pride and Prejudice, for example, and Emily Brontë wrote "It opened into the house, where the females were already astir" in Wuthering Heights.
Yet even back in those times other people complained that using female in this way was demeaning (5), and I agree with Liz that it doesn't sound right today. Merriam-Webster's goes on to say that the neutral use of Austen and Brontë has faded away, and the most common use of the word female now as a noun is to refer to lower animals. For example, if you were studying apes, you could say something like, “The females formed a small group to defend against the attackers.” (6)
It's my recommendation that you use female as a noun only when you are speaking about animals or writing scientifically. When you are talking about female humans, the favored nouns are woman and women. Likewise, when you're talking about male humans, the favored nouns are man and men.
1. woman. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman (accessed June 8, 2016).
2. woman. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2015. https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=woman&submit.x=0&submit.y=0 (accessed June 8, 2016).
3. woman. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/woman (accessed June 8, 2016).
4. woman. Oxford English Dictionary. Second edition. Oxford University Press, http://0-www.oed.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/view/Entry/229884?rskey=zgmG44&result=1#eid (accessed June 8, 2016, subscription required).
5. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1994, pp. 440-41.
6. American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, pp. 180-81.
Mignon Fogarty is the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips and the author of seven books on language, including the New York Times bestseller "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing." She is an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame, and the show is a five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. She has appeared as a guest expert on the Oprah Winfrey Show and the Today Show. Her popular LinkedIn Learning courses help people write better to communicate better.
Copyright © 2021 Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. Quick & Dirty Tips™ and related trademarks appearing on this website are the property of Mignon Fogarty, Inc. and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
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