This week, Sir Roger Gale, the MP, has come under fire for referring to his female employees as 'girls'. One of his employees, Debi Hill, has defended him - "he's not sexist and we feel valued by him" - but there has been a furore about his decision to refer to the grown women he works with as 'girls'.

It brings to mind the other words that tend to follow women around workplaces - from 'ambitious' to 'bossy' and the dreaded 'feisty' - a word defined in the Collins English Dictionary as:

1) Lively, resilient and self-reliant

2) (US and Canadian) frisky

3) (US and Canadian) irritable.

None of these definitions mentions gender. Indeed, the adjective would appear to be gender neutral – until you look at the example sentences given by the dictionary:

"He realised she was not a feisty woman after all," "Our beauty is now male, and is awoken by a feisty young girl", to "Why were even the most intelligent and feisty women so foolish when it came to being hopelessly in love?" (from the book Tickled Pink).

Not one refers to a ‘feisty male’, suggesting the adjective is one of those words that shows a vocabularly gender divide - and a wider level of everyday sexism. A label thrown at women, usually with negative connotations, that would never be used for a man.