CC BY: Charlie

Female vs. Women: On Writing Adjectives, Nouns, And Inclusive Language

No matter what you’ve been saying or writing, you’ve been doing it wrong all this time. Apparently.

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.

The problem with “woman” as adjective

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.

Paving a new path

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?