Kim Cambell’s personal website describes her as Canada’s first and only female prime minister, but in a Status of Women Canada profile she’s instead Canada’s first woman prime minister. Theresa May referred to herself as the UK’s second female prime minister, but in the Telegraph she’s the country’s second “woman PM”. And a Los Angeles Times article about Elizabeth Warren asks whether Americans are ready for a female president in the page text but a woman president in the page’s title bar.

(Length: 1,400 words.)

1. Debate

Which one is it? There’s a bunch of discussion in articles and grammar blogs about whether “female” or “woman” is the more appropriate adjective. The question most often comes up for political roles like politician, candidate, MP, and senator, but other roles come up too—do you have a female boss or a woman boss?

“Female Trouble: The Debate Over ‘Woman’ as an Adjective” (New Yorker)

“Female vs. Women: On Writing Adjectives, Nouns, And Inclusive Language” (Medium)

“Language: Woman vs. female” (New York Times)

Some of the commentary expresses frustration that people ever feel the need to specify the gender of a politician or boss at all. It’s understandable to suggest that people avoid emphasizing gender when it’s not relevant, but sometimes there is a specific reason to mention someone’s gender, and so the question of how to do it remains.

Arguments for “female politician” and “female boss” tend to be grammatical. Many people have the intuition that “woman” works best as a noun and sounds awkward as an adjective, so “my boss is a woman” works but “I have a woman boss” doesn’t. (This does not affect compounds like “woman-hater” or “man-hater”.)

Arguments for “woman politician” and “woman boss” tend to be social or stylistic. Many people have the intuition that “female” is cold, clinincal, or demeaning, particularly because it can also refer to non-human animals. From the New Yorker article, “[a] woman is human; a female might be a sea cow”. From the New York Times article:

We’re hearing woman as an adjective more often now. Female connotes a biological category. I think many feminists avoid it for the same reason they prefer gender to sex. … I avoid female in my own writing because it feels disrespectful, as if I’m treating the people I’m referring to as mammals but not humans. Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University

The relative merit of these grammatical vs. social/stylistic arguments and whether we should prefer “female” or “woman” in these cases is not my concern here. What I instead want to highlight is that there has been no comparable push or transition towards a more “human” adjective for men. This contrast is visible in the following Reddit comment referring to “male MPs” (members of parliament) in the same sentence as “women MPs”.

Furthermore, I’d point out that the measures parliment is taking to control the harassment of MPs online are all gender neutral; male MPs can take advantage of them equally to women MPs.

If “female” is a problem that has to be avoided—cold, clinical, demeaning, not necessarily human—then “male” presumably is a problem too, but people don’t seem to think so.

2. Data

For a more comprehensive look at adjective preferences we can use Google Books Ngram Viewer, which provides historical data from a large collection of books and other texts.

For easier comparison I have extracted and summarized the most recent year available: 2000. The following tables provide data on the adjectives “woman”, “female”, “male”, and “man” as used with 27 different nouns. The first column compares use of “woman” with “female” (an entry of 53% means that “woman” is used 53% of the time and “female” is used the other 47%). The second column similarly compares “man” with “male” (5% means that “man” is used in 5% of cases and “male” the other 95%). The third column shows overall how common mentions of gender are for women compared to men; it provides the ratio between the combined frequency of the two adjectives for women (“woman” and “female”) and the combined frequency of the two adjectives for men (“man” and “male”). An entry of 76:24 means that there were about three times more mentions of gender for women than for men. This does not directly say anything about which adjectives people choose, but it is provided for context and interest.

The first table provides data on adjectives used with ten high status nouns.

Noun Human adjective for women Human adjective for men Overall F:M ratio politician 53% 5% 76:24 politicians 69% 5% 69:31 boss 33% 6% 53:47 senator 58% 0% 92:8 mayor 70% 47% 98:2 doctor 70% 6% 77:23 MP 90% 0% 95:5 CEO 32% 0% 77:23 governor 73% 20% 94:6 surgeon 62% 3% 78:22

(“MP” was searched in only the British English texts. “Politicians” was searched with the plural “women” and “men” instead of “woman” and “man”.)

The second table covers ten middle/working-class occupation nouns, half of which are predominantly female fields and half are predominantly male fields.

Noun Human adjective for women Human adjective for men Overall F:M ratio teacher 38% 7% 61:39 veterinarian 66% 0% 92:8 nurse 7% 1% 27:83 secretary 27% 3% 61:39 social worker 28% 3% 69:31 accountant 28% 0% 69:31 carpenter 47% 11% 57:43 plumber 65% 0% 57:43 soldier 49% 5% 67:33 mechanic 41% 3% 65:35

The third table covers seven low status nouns.

Noun Human adjective for women Human adjective for men Overall F:M ratio criminal 6% 7% 68:32 prisoner 43% 19% 74:26 convict 14% 3% 79:21 prostitute 8% 0% 33:67 beggar 32% 20% 72:28 refugee 69% 0% 86:14 victim 13% 1% 72:28

These tables present all of the nouns that I searched (with the exception of two, “felon” and “thug”, that did not have enough data for calculations).

3. Interpretation

The overall pattern here is clear: “woman” is a much stronger contender for “female” than “man” is for “male”. The mean rate of choosing the human adjective was 44% when referring to women but just 6% for men. If the main reason for choosing “woman” over “female” is that the latter is “disrespectful, as if […] treating the people […] as mammals but not humans”, then this difference in usage indicates that people might be more concerned with emphasizing the humanity of women than of men.

One way to better understand the difference in adjective preferences for women and men is to compare the three status categories. Numerically, the gender gap in adjective preference is largest for high status nouns (52 points), followed by middle/working-class occupations (39 points), and then low status nouns (19 points). Based on these category differences, it appears that the phenomenon of people being more concerned with emphasizing the humanity of women than men is particularly focused on middle and high status positions. In lower status positions, women seem to get treated more like men.

Noun category Human adjective for women Human adjective for men Difference High status 61% 9% 52 Middle status 42% 3% 39 Low status 26% 7% 19

There is still considerable variation within each status category. For example, among high status nouns “MP” shows a much bigger gender difference in adjective preference than “boss” does. This might be better understood with more fine-grained status category distinctions (“MP” is more high status than “boss”). There are also many other factors that could potentially influence adjective choice and help explain differences between nouns: sympathy-worthiness (e.g., in “criminal” versus “refugee”), gender typicality (e.g., in “nurse” and “veterinarian” versus “carpenter” and “accountant”), and overall rates of mentioning gender for women compared to men (note that it’s not necessarily that the less typical gender in a role is more likely to be gender-specified; “nurse” and “veterinarian” are both typically female, but one is more likely to be gender-specified for men and the other for women).

4. Conclusions

Like dress codes, adjective use is not a gender issue involving great material harm. However, I want to bring attention to this issue because it provides insight into how people think about gender. Choosing a more “human” adjective for women but not for men sends a message of being more concerned with emphasizing women’s humanity than men’s.

Depending on the person, this choice might be related to having more positive attitudes towards women than men (the women-are-wonderful effect). It might also be related to a feminist belief that women are the underdogs in a system that’s made to benefit men and keep women down. If someone believes that women are oppressed and dehumanized (a perspective I disagree with but one that certainly exists), they might put special attention towards emphasizing women’s humanity.

However, given the latter explanation, it is strange that this phenomenon appears to apply the most to women in positions of higher status. To the extent that women actually are “oppressed and dehumanized”, clearly women in higher status positions are not the primarily victims of that or the ones in primary need of humanization.

That explanation also raises questions about future usage. If in the future women are judged to no longer require special emphasis on their humanity, is there a mechanism for updating usage (whether starting to use the more human adjective for men too or no longer using it for women)? Or will this pattern simply be cemented and retained?