In recent years, some governments and organizations have started paying more attention to the power of words, taking steps to update or replace gendered terms.

In 2013, Washington State joined Florida and Minnesota in combing through its state codes and statutes to adjust terms like “ombudsman” (now “ombuds”) to be gender neutral. As Liz Watson, then senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said at the time: “Words matter. Words help shape our perceptions about what opportunities are available to women and men.”

Administrators at Yale announced in 2017 that they would replace the words “freshman” and “upperclassman” with “first-year” and “upper-level” students, joining several other universities that have informally made the change. And the singular “they” — increasingly popular as both as substitute for “he or she” and as a gender-neutral pronoun for those who identify as nonbinary — was recently declared the “Word of the Decade” by the American Dialect Society.

That would seem like progress, said the historian Barbara J. Berg. Yet when it comes to the halls of power, she said, the masculine “remains the default in our language.”

It is popular these days to tell the story of Abigail Adams, wife of the founding father John, who urged her husband in a letter in 1776 to “remember the ladies.” Lesser known is that his reply, in a letter back, called her request “saucy.” (The word “she,” of course, does not appear anywhere in the Declaration of Independence, nor does the word “woman.”)

And while, over the years, words like “mailman,” “policeman” and “stewardess” have been replaced with terms like “mail carrier,” “police officer” and “flight attendant,” there are still plenty of phrases for which “he” connotes power. Think “manning the command post,” “maestro” or even “guy” as a way to describe expertise. “As in, ‘He’s a stats guy’ or ‘He’s a policy guy,’” said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.

The 2018 midterm elections broke all sorts of records — and a historic number of women ran for office and won — and yet they also provided ample opportunity to hear (and see) the phrase “freshman congresswoman.” Doesn’t it sound sort of funny?