I’ve spent quite a bit of the last few days crossing out the word “females” and writing “women” in its place. More time than seems reasonable, certainly. I’ve been marking, so this crossing out is part of my job, but it has called my attention to just how often I see “females” used when the writer means “women”. I’m not particularly criticising my students: I don’t think they do it more than another random group, when adjusted for demographic factors such as age, class and average knowledge of John Donne’s early poetry. I think it’s a much wider issue, and not just pedantry about words.
For a start, it’s disrespectful (and may, of course, be inaccurate, since not all people who identify as women are female.) It may not be intended as such, but calling women “females” is substituting an adjective for a noun. Female what? It turns a person into an attribute, their individual self replaced by a general category. If that sounds like I’m reading too much into grammar, consider how careful we are not to do to this other groups of people whose members include women. You don’t hear most people talking about “a Chinese”, or “a black”, or “a disabled”. Or if you do, you can guess the views of the person using those terms towards the people they’re talking about. They don’t see them as individuals worthy of consideration. They’re lumping them all together, as if “they’re all the same”. It’s verbal shorthand for thinking of someone as a person second, and the category you’ve put them into first. Given the care we take not to accept this sort of language in other forms, it’s astonishing how frequently you see “females” in various forms of writing.
In most cases don’t think this slur is intentional, but the comparison should bring us up short. Does it, in fact, reflect the way we write and speak about women? Is there an assumption in a lot of the media, fiction and scholarly writing we consume that the most pertinent feature of a woman is her gender? That this will somehow explain or determine features of her personality, making assumptions that we wouldn’t make about a man? Actually, “females” is a pretty clear pointer to the way too much of our culture thinks about women: that we can see them as people only after we have labelled and categorised them as female.
I was talking about this to my fellow blogger Siân, speculating that perhaps it appears so frequently because the writer wants to add a spurious air of “scientific” authority to their statements. As she pointed out, this merely takes us further into troubling images of women: they are so often pictured as the object of knowledge rather than the knowing subject. They’re talked about as if they are a topic to be investigated, described as “mysterious”. The very suggestion that women are “mysterious” pre-supposes that the person being faced with this enigma is a man. In my experience the men most likely to go on about how “you can’t tell what a female is thinking” are the least likely to have tried asking her. Again, the very grammar of that complaint assumes that the “you” is male: it is men who discover, probe and explain. Women are framed as the object of their inquiry.
So we don’t need to talk about “females”. This term betrays the assumptions behind Nuts magazine, behind endless jokes about “women drivers” and the prejudices female students face in Maths and Computer Science departments. It puts women “over there”, as something strange and depersonalized and faintly threatening. Seeing more “women” in essays might be a tiny step in the long and much-needed progress to seeing more of them in boardrooms, in Parliament and on the syllabus.
quiteirregular 
I essentially disagree with this whole article, because I think it’s so insignificant whether we refer to an individual by their gender or not.
I understand from a grammatical standpoint, female is often used as an adjective, but it can also be used as a general classification, when differentiating between age. No one calls a 6 year old a “woman”. They call her a girl. When a baby boy is born, they don’t exclaim, “It’s a man!”, they exclaim it’s a boy.
So what words can we use when we need to describe someone officially, such as on a birth certificate, or drivers licesne? Surely, it makes no sense to put boy and girl – that seems too geared towards young people. Man and woman doesn’t make sense either, if they’ve not yet reached adulthood.
So yes, we sometimes need a word that can describe a gender of any age, as to not be insensetive about what constitues being a girl vs. a woman or a boy vs. a man. Those words are male, and female.
re: the above.
I understand from a grammatical standpoint, female is often used as an adjective, but it can also be used as a general classification, when differentiating between age. No one calls a 6 year old a “woman”. They call her a girl. When a baby boy is born, they don’t exclaim, “It’s a man!”, they exclaim it’s a boy.
— yes, but then you’re using nouns (girl, boy) not adjectives (female, male). Nobody says “it’s a female!” when a baby’s born. So that bit doesn’t make a lot of sense. Actually, what I don’t like about the use of “female” as a noun is that I think it dehumanises women and makes them sound like animals. It’s how you’d distinguish various kittens (unless you said tom or queen) – ‘the female’s the one with the tabby markings’ or meerkats or whatever else you were observing. And ‘the female of the species’ etc, etc. And if on passport forms we see the word “male” or “female”, I think (I don’t have my passport to hand) that it’s in response to “sex”, i.e. acting as an adjective again? Just as if it said “eyes – blue” it’d mean “my eyes are blue”.
We might conceivably need to refer to males or females in strictly medical discourse (I… am not a medic, but I suppose we could say ‘in males, you’d expect production of hormone x [or whatever] to start at such-and-such an age’, for example), but not otherwise.
I think it’s so insignificant whether we refer to an individual by their gender or not.
Well, then, I can see why you disagree with the article. I don’t mean that to be rude, but people with non-binary gender identities, who identify as agendered, or who (for whatever reason) have a fraught or evolving relationship to their gender or biological sex identity might have very good reason for not wanting to be referred to by their gender (for example, that they don’t want to be ‘outed’ in their identity, or to be forced to out themselves). Also, lots of women, even cisgendered women, feel that society defines them by their gender (or rather, their biological sex, in the case of ‘female’) in a way that’s negative/damaging in a way that it just isn’t for men. Accordingly, they would rather be referred to by other things unless strictly necessary (e.g. for medical reasons). I identify perfectly happy as a woman, am probably XX chromosomally and so forth, but if I heard myself described as ‘a female’ in anything other than a report by the police (should I be spotted on CCTV during one of my crime sprees) or our new alien overlords, I’d balk.
You might disagree with the whole article, but you’re betraying the fact that you haven’t read it very closely.
Jem isn’t denying the purpose of the words male and female in a scientific or “official” context, he is arguing against the use of “female” when the writer should be saying “women”. When people say things like “we need more females in the technology industry” it’s dehumanising. The words you choose are important, so why default to a word that could refer to literally any female-gendered organism?
So what words can we use when we need to describe someone officially, such as on a birth certificate, or drivers licence?
The clue’s in the question. I am not a grammarian, but broadly speaking, when we want to describe something we use an adjective (female). When we want to name someone, or a group of someones, we use a noun (woman/women). Because adjectives in English do not agree with their subject, there should be no need for a construction such as ‘females’ even to exist.
Oh good. A MAN failing to see how the term *female* could possibly be derogatory.
As the essay states, female what? Horse? Guppy?
A female human is a woman or a girl.
To refer to her as female serves only to categorise her in no more than simple veterinary/entomological terms.
And intentional or not, that’s insulting.
Ohh, good one. Well I’m a MALE and I don’t find the term MALE derogatory. Only you radically oversensitive people care about this type of thing.
The term female is a generalization when age is a discretion. Some people hate being called a man/women when they’re young and of course older men/women don’t like being called girls or boys.
I don’t see how this generalization hurts anyone. If someone came up to me and said YOU’RE A HOMO SAPIEN, I would be a little taken back at the random remark but I wouldn’t be offended. He is correct after all. Why deny the word that describes the gender you fight for? You are a feminist no? What’s the root word of feminist? Oh right, female.
No, the root of “feminist” would be “femina”. A noun meaning “woman”, not the adjective “female”. Don’t usually argue from etymology, but you brought it up.
Oh, so all these people fight for the rights of women, but not girls. That makes total sense.
Nope, that’s not what I argued. I merely corrected your etymology, showing that it didn’t prove what you claimed it proved.
Oh, come now, Collin. Surely you are being deliberately obtuse.
Actually Feminine/Femina comes from the word Felare meaning “one who suckles,i.e, the mother of the child” – well within the limits to call it “female”-
so your etymology point is moot.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=feminine&allowed_in_frame=0
Syropian left a comment in which he challenges some of the things Quiteirregular says in the blog post. He also, right at the end, gets a piece of etymology wrong.
Instead of correcting his mistake AND responding to the rest of his comment, Quiteirregular ignores the rest of it in order to point out the etymological problem and score an easy victory. No offense, but that’s a conversation-stunting cop-out. It happens all the time on the internet. Look how off-track the conversation just got. I’m a bit disappointed.
No offence taken. However, his arguments were so obviously false and were so clearly dealt with by other commenters that I didn’t feel the need to address them. He’s welcome to have his say, and I’m under no obligation to reply, however much that might disappoint you.
“So what words can we use when we need to describe someone officially, such as on a birth certificate, or drivers licesne?”
This question is based on a mistaken presupposition about how birth certificates work. Birth certificates and other documentation have a field for “sex”. This is correctly answered with an adjective, because the implicit question being answered is “what is the sex of this child” – and the implicit answer is “this child is male/female”.
If your birth certificate says that you are “a female” or “a male” then it is a forgery, and not a very good one.
I think part of the issue, Collin, is how often you will see a comment or article where the words man/men are used alongside the words female/s.
It’s cool that you wouldn’t mind being called a male, but I think you are coming from a position where this sort of thing has never been an issue (perhaps not even something you had noticed before), therefore your ability to be magnanimous and chilled about it all is fairly understandable.
I was directed here because I remarked on the following comment;
I have known men who were abused by females. When the police arrived, even though the man was bruised, cut, and bleeding and the female had not a scratch, the officers always treated the man as the guilty party. In the few cases where arrests were made, both were arrested even though the man never touched the female. Of course, females have it worse so it is only fair to expect the man to be arrested, tried, and convicted even if he did not do anything wrong.
Now, imagine that, but every single day. It is noticeable and it is irritating.
When I hear someone say “female” instead of woman, I usually reply “What? A human female?”
In your opinion, does using the word “male” also dehumanise men?
I ask because I can only speak from my own experiences, and if (when) I’m referred to as male, I don’t bat an eyelid. I probably haven’t noticed 95% of the times it’s happened – it’s just a descriptive word and, pedantry aside, I simply see it as another way of expressing the word “man”.
People are different – I don’t care if people refer to me as Greek. Why? Because I’m Greek. TBH I don’t even care if people refer to me as fat. Why? Well, you get the picture.
There are plenty of women (and men – I live in Yorkshire!) that call me “love” (isn’t that also a noun? Love what?). I don’t see a problem with it, but I know of a few women who wouldn’t be happy with being called that. Each to their own.
So yes, from a grammatical sense you’re right, but I struggle to see it as offensive in the wider sense. Different people are offended by different things, which is fine – everyone’s different. But I doubt the majority would agree with your suggestion that describing someone as “a female” (or a male) is offensive, myself included.
I don’t describe women as “female” nor do I describe men as “males”. But if, for some reason, it slipped out one day in conversation – I wouldn’t think twice about it, and I would expect the same for anyone talking to me.
“WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?” he screamed.
You have completely missed the point of the whole article.
If someone described me as a female person, I’d think it was an odd construction, but not actually rude. However, if they described me as “a female”, it would sound rude, because as someone commented above, it sounds like I am being referred to in the way someone would refer to an animal. It is the same way that saying “a transsexual”, “a Chinese”, “a black” is rude.
Fairly, tragically, describing you or indeed me as a “female person” at least gives us more personhood and humanity than just females, which makes us sound like specimens or breeding animals!
People are different – I don’t care if people refer to me as Greek. Why? Because I’m Greek. TBH I don’t even care if people refer to me as fat. Why? Well, you get the picture.
I don’t mind if people refer to me as female, or as overweight. Because those are adjectives that describe me. What I do mind is being described as ‘a female’ or one of ‘the obese’, as though what should be a description of one aspect of my identity (my sex or my weight) has been used as a sole descriptor for my self.
But I doubt the majority would agree with your suggestion that describing someone as “a female” (or a male) is offensive, myself included.
As a general rule, I believe we should leave it to members of the offensive group to decide if it’s offensive or not. I know a lot of women who find this usage offensive and betraying a generalised view of women as a mysterious other, worthy of scientific examination. Even if most don’t, surely using words in a way that doesn’t hurt and demean (even some) people isn’t too much to ask? Especially of English Lit students who are presumably interested in how and why words get used!
But if, for some reason, it slipped out one day in conversation – I wouldn’t think twice about it, and I would expect the same for anyone talking to me.
But Jem specifcally isn’t talking about it slipping out in conversation. The blog doesn’t say ‘someone said this once to me in a pub and I think it’s wrong’. He’s talking about something that has cropped up again and again in essays he’s marking.
Not paying enough attention. Objection is to the use of the term “a female” not to the use of the term “female”. I’m willing to bet that whenever anyone calls you “male” they follow that up with a noun.
Also, unless you can prove it, appealing to a silent majority that just happens to agree with you is a waste of everyone’s time.
“I’m willing to bet that whenever anyone calls you “male” they follow that up with a noun.”
I’m guessing those follow-up nouns are “rights activist”.
Very interesting.. I often use female when I am not sure whether to write woman or girl. Will start just saying woman now I have read this.
This is fair! A really quick rule of thumb: girl refers to a women 16 years old or younger in most style guides. If you’re unsure, women is more appropriate; if gender does not matter people/person/etc is even more appropriate.
I sympathise with the article, but would nevertheless like to make two points. (1) Grammatically, it is very common for adjectives to be used as nouns (cf. ‘The Naked and the Dead’; ‘The Red and the Black’; ‘the meek shall inherit the earth), so there’s no reason why ‘female’ shouldn’t be used as a noun. (2) I don’t think anyone yet has answered the question of what word to use when referring to both women and girls. Shane suggests ‘woman’, but that isn’t always appropriate. We could just always say ‘women and girls’ but that is three words instead of one, plus it implies all kinds of things about how we distinguish between those two categories that we might not wish to imply. (‘Girls’ become ‘women’ at different ages/stages, whether individually or in different cultures). I would submit that the noun ‘female’ can therefore be very useful, and context will almost always reveal whether the writer is referring to humans or guppies. As a female myself, I don’t find the noun ‘female’ offensive on its own – if a writer is being offensive, there will be plenty other clues in the text.
Thanks for commenting, and I’m glad you don’t find the term derogatory. A lot of women seem to, however, and I don’t think that’s unrelated to the way it positions them within language – and that in a lot of writing it acts as an alarm bell signalling unpleasant opinions to come. Aren’t there problems with those examples? If The Red and the Black was written in a gendered language, wouldn’t that make it more common to use adjectives to imply nouns (which clearly has its own problems…)? And surely the title Le Rouge et Le Noir isn’t using the words as epithets but metonymies? ‘The state of wearing a red uniform and the state of wearing a black cassock’, not ‘the red man and the black man’. One wouldn’t refer to a priest in French as ‘that black over there’, would one? The other two are surely translations from Latin, and highly archaic – when was the last time you heard someone in an office say ‘I am surrounded by the faces of the tired and the apprehensive this Monday morning’? I must admit grammar (certainly comparative!) isn’t my specialist field, but I thought the problem with ‘females’ was one of the way these terms hold an anomalous position in our language.
I don’t think anyone yet has answered the question of what word to use when referring to both women and girls.
That is a really interesting point. I’m trying to recall what’s used when referring to men and boys – I don’t think it’s males (or at least, not commonly). For instance, I don’t think I’ve seen a sentence such as, ‘The high number of males in the prison population…’ or ‘There are more males at football matches than at classical music concerts’ or ‘Heavy metal tends to appeal more to males.’
It would seem (though you’d have to analyise a corpus – newspaper articles, perhaps, to be sure – this is just anecdata) that it’s more common to use ‘men’ to mean ‘men and boys’ and ‘females’ to mean ‘women and girls’, which in itself is an interesting linguistic quirk.
(I definitely have heard ‘females’ used – mainly derogatively – when there is no confusion over age, though. It seems to be a favourite of pub bores. ‘Females’ don’t drink beer, leave the cooking to the ‘females’ hahaha. Obviously those would still be sexist statements if you switched ‘females’ for ‘women’ or, indeed, ‘girls’.)
Yes, it’d be interesting to hear what terms people might use. To me (and I do mean just “to me”) those “males” statements all sound as if they’re going to launch into scientific statements: “more males…because gland P…” The only term I could come up with was “blokes” or “guys”, but that’s slangy and “guys” is frequently used for mixed groups. Plus if you were including young boys in “blokes” (itself a stretch), it again feels like a statement that’s going to carry on into gender essentialism – he’s playing with a hammer because blokes are the ones who prefer that – the blokes are all going out to the park bcos…, etc. “The men” was sometimes used of males in my family, but it always clearly had quotation marks around it, as if the younger members were being promoted for that sentence.
All of which, I suppose, raises the issue of what sort of statements we (tend to) make when we generalise across gender rather than, say, age. What statements will be more true of men&boys vs women&girls than children vs adults? Lots of things, I daresay, but many of the sorts of statements made in our society at the moment based on that line being drawn are ones we’d like to critique.
The other issue which I think “females” raises is class. Tnis is going to be very anecdotal and specific to my experience (not least in terms of class!) but when I hear people of my parents’ generation say “there were two…females…there” they always mean “women not of our class (or behaving as if they aren’t)”. It’s what they’d say about drunk women behaving “badly” on a hen night, or hanging round a street corner in “revealing” clothing, or shouting at each other in a market.
I find “female” used as a noun derogatory for the same reason I find “illegal” used as a noun derogatory. Both efface the humanity of a person.
> In most cases don’t think this slur is intentional
> slur
hahaha.
You females are crazy.
I can understand how the concept would be difficult for someone like you, so let me use smaller words to try to explain it better. How would you feel if someone referred to you as a “retard” rather than describing you as “mentally disabled?”
First, I agree with the general sentiment of the article. The term female (and for that matter male) is dehumanizing. They have their place, but are often overused or misused.
However, so many of the above comments focus on the grammatical use of the word I feel this point needs mentioning. The word female can correctly be used as either a noun or an adjective. The author of the article was incorrect to say otherwise…a unfortunate mistake since someone who is marking students’ papers should know better.
Don’t believe me? Check any dictionary. I checked four before clicking the post comment button and they all agreed.
I write about sexual health, which can be pretty difficult to do without alienating people across the gender spectrum. I much prefer the terms male and female, as adjectives or nouns. (Sorry, but I don’t buy the prescriptivist claims that these words aren’t nouns. They are clearly used as nouns and have been for a long time.) “Female” and “male” are also the only words that don’t make distinctions based on age, and for that reason have much utility.
If I’m talking about urinary tract infections in females vs. males, it’s much easier to use that kind of language rather than the inaccessible “people with short urethras vs. people with long urethras.” Microbes are interacting with your body on a cellular level, they are not interacting with your gender identity. In this context, it makes complete sense to “reduce” things to a biological level. I think this can be done while still honoring people’s gender identities. Words like “women” and “men” carry so much baggage with them, and just as you say “not all people who identify as women are female,” it also holds that not all people who identify as female are women.
Mostly, I don’t want to make assumptions about people and how they identify. Calling someone a “woman” or a “man” without knowing how they identify seems awfully presumptuous to me. I know it annoys me when people assume I identify as a “woman” and refer to me as such. I see “male” and “female” as much more neutral and free of baggage, and I am not the only one who thinks this way. Objections to these terms have, in my experience, been pretty recent, when only a decade ago, when I started reading about transgender and genderqueer issues, those terms seemed to have been hailed as much more “politically correct.” I’m sad to see the tide turning. “Male” and “female” have their place, and I don’t need people insisting that they call me a “woman” in order not to “dehumanize” me, when they are doing the exact opposite of what they claim.
Thanks for your perspective. Obviously in medical discourse, “male” and “female” are appropriate.
“You don’t hear most people talking about “a Chinese”, or “a black”, or “a disabled”. Or if you do, you can guess the views of the person using those terms towards the people they’re talking about.”
Really? So, nobody would ever say, “last night’s group was three Americans and two Chinese”? “A black” and “a disabled” sound funny, but I certainly wouldn’t draw conclusions about the speaker or author from that alone. But then, I’m not particularly judgmental.
Female means female. Woman is vague and has many different connotations for different people. Do you mean any female who has reached the age of menstruation? A female who has had sex? One who has given birth to children? One who has reached the arbitrary age of 18 or 21?
As for gender identity labeling problems, that just reveals the shortcomings of the English language.
Wow, I don’t care if people call me a male, why do women get so caught up in this? No wonder there seems to be so much inequality.
Pingback: problem, problematisation – what’s the difference? | patter
It’s funny… when I’m normally referring to a female, people think I’m referring to a woman. When I’m referring to a woman, people think I’m referring to a female. If you put this much thought into something this banal, I really hope your cat is getting fed. Sheesh.
The very first definition of the word “female”on dictionary.com: a person bearing two X chromosomes in the cell nuclei and normally having a vagina, a uterus and ovaries, and developing at puberty a relatively rounded body and enlarged breasts, and retaining a beardless face; a girl or woman.
It can be used as either a noun or an adjective. If you’re going to read that much into grammar, you should read properly.
The ‘appeal to dictionary’ (think that’s Bejoint but I forget) isn’t improved by the addition of ‘.com’ If you’re going to read that much into lexicography, you should read some of it.
The word “female” is actually a noun. Just like the word male. To refer to some as a “male” or “female” is saying that, “Oh that person has an XY gene” or “Oh that person has an XX gene”. Neither of those terms are discriminating at all. The rest of this article seemed to be a completely unrelated side tangent of how we see women in our culture, and then trying to over analyse basic things such as how in English, we tend to use “you” to refer to an implied group. “You can never understand a woman” assumes a non woman group. “You just have to give a man his guy time” assumes a non man group. “You touch the button to get the prize” assumes anyone. I don’t see any problem with that.
Funnily enough, I’ve only noticed this the other way round: Girls and males (where “boys” seemed inappropriate for the age group in question). I think it happens because in common use, the transition from “Girls” to “Women” tends to refer to an older age than than the transition from “Boys” to “Men”. At both transition points, there’s an asymmetry in the words that spring to mind.
Speculating wildly, I suspect this asymmetry it due to youth being more highly valued amongst women and maturity being more highly valued amongst boys, i.e. it is considered complimentary to refer to a thirty-year-old woman as a “Girl” and to an eighteen-year-old boy as a “Man”.
Good post, female.
Pingback: The Luxury of Surprise: Gender and Online Abuse | quiteirregular
I understand how annoying it is when there is disparity between the way people are referred to (such as men and females), but women and females are different things. You can be female and a man, or male and a woman – because one is sex, the other is gender. Which is the right choice depends on the context and statement.
The statement: “women have babies, men cannot” is incorrect, but the statement “females have babies,males cannot” is accurate. Transwomen cant have babies, but transmen can.
The statement: “women are culturally expected to wear makeup,men are not” is correct, the statement “females are culturally expected to wear makeup, males are not” is also correct. It is culturally expected that you will adopt a gender in accord with your sex.
The statement “women are slut shamed, men are not” is correct, the statement “females are slut shamed, males are not” is incorrect. Transmen dont get slut-shamed, but transwomen do.
… What the fuck?
Reblogged this on Gender and Eighteenth-Century Fiction and commented:
Thought-provoking piece on how we write about women!