Female vs. Woman

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Krista from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Krista. Welcome.

Thank you.

What’s happening?

I have a pet peeve, and I’d like to hear your opinion on its appropriate usage.

All right. We’d love to opine.

Oh, good. I’ve noticed lately that people are substituting the word female for the word woman.

So, for example, female suicide bomber.

So when it’s used as an adjective or as a noun, like a lot of females in the room or I’m a female.

And to me, that smacks of like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

Like we’re talking about tigers or something.

And I’m not quite sure why people, I understand there’s sort of a general discomfort with the word woman.

And that’s a different call for a different program.

But I’m just wondering if it’s probably technically correct to use female, but when is it more appropriate?

And Jim will now attempt to tranquilize the female of the species.

The female of the species waits for the male to approach.

Sorry, you just sent us off in a different direction.

We are.

We’re back.

We remember those shows, right?

It was that certain cadence that you only found on those shows, right?

That’s right.

But there is something kind of clinical about it, right?

As if you’re somehow removed from what you’re observing or talking about.

Yes.

And this point of view that you have, that there’s something not quite right about using female as a noun, goes back hundreds of years.

And it even goes back nearly to the beginning of female as a word in English when it was borrowed from the French.

And much has been written about this.

A lot of people today think it sounds like a cop talking, somebody who is trying to sound more important than they actually are.

A female suspect approached and pulled out a gun, you know, whatever.

It’s this kind of stilted language where you say something in kind of an awkward way.

Nobody really ever talks like that.

One of the quotes that I really like here is a fellow by the name of Alford in 1866 says, why should a woman be degraded from her position as a rational being and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe?

And commentator after commentator over the years has condemned the use of female as a noun.

And yet, and yet it still persists, which is really interesting.

It says a little bit about our need for these two nouns that mean roughly the same thing.

There is some connotation, right?

There’s something else happening.

There’s some extra information contained in female that’s not in the word woman and vice versa, so that we feel the need to use one or the other in certain circumstances.

What do you think that extra information is?

Well, it’s a good question.

I think Krista hinted at it when she suggested that there’s a discomfort with using the word woman.

What do you think that discomfort is, Krista?

Because I think that’s definitely a part of this conversation.

Oh, I was a women’s studies minor, so how much time do you have?

Well, if you can condense your dissertation down into a couple sentences.

Okay.

So you learn a female studies.

They would prefer lady, and then when you’re using it in sort of a less subjective context, lady doesn’t quite fit, and for some reason woman doesn’t feel right.

I don’t know if that’s the old use of woman of the night, or it feels insulting to call someone a woman without conferring on them the lady status.

I’m not quite sure what that is.

And you’re just talking about this straight-up noun.

You’re not talking about using female and woman as adjectives or attributive nouns, right?

You’re not where you say a woman doctor or a woman president or a female senator.

Or a woman driver.

Well, that’s what I mean.

That’s a subject for a different show.

Okay, I see.

There you go.

What show would that be?

I’m not sure that that show exists.

But no, in that case as well, even though I find that irritating to say a woman doctor or a woman engineer, that for some reason woman requires some different special classification.

But even then you hear female doctor, female engineer.

It just makes it worse.

And what do you say naturally if you say you prefer to go to a gynecologist of your same gender?

How would you say that?

I’d say a gynecologist that’s a woman.

Oh, really?

Or not a male gynecologist.

You say the fully articulated phrase then.

I tend to fully articulate.

Yeah.

Well, to summarize this, and you’re right, it’s a huge topic.

I can refer to you to a couple of places where it’s discussed at length.

But to summarize this, there are a lot of people who feel the way you do.

But I don’t think we’re ever going to come down with a, this is the waffle answer.

Get up your flip-flops.

I don’t think we’re ever going to come up with an answer here that’s going to satisfy all parties.

There is clearly, when you look at the large samples of text, of spoken English and written English, you clearly find there’s something happening where female is doing a job that woman can’t quite accomplish and woman is doing a job that female can’t quite accomplish.

Some of it is a little clinical. Some of it is a little personal.

Some of it actually is appropriately impersonal.

I do feel that sometimes when people, at least if I’m judging the data correctly, when people use the noun woman instead of the noun female, they actually mean it in a nonjudgmental and purely description way, whereas when they use the noun female, there’s something about being the female that’s important to the sentence.

Maybe that’s what kind of is kind of tripping your buttons here.

Let me just encourage you to take a look at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

There’s something like two and a half or three pages about this very subject, with examples drawn from history over hundreds of years.

And a really good summary at the end that just kind of points out that, look, this has been a dispute for a long time.

It doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolved anytime soon.

And we might just have to deal with it in our own writing as best we can and kind of forgive others when they have trespasses that don’t align with our understanding.

I will try to do that.

Cool.

All right.

Well, thank you so much, Krista, for giving us a call.

Thanks very much.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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