Gender marking in job titles

One of the chief issues with which the movement for gender-neutral language has been concerned is that of gender (sex) specificity in job titles.

A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job title stewardess implies that the person is female; the job title policeman implies that the person is male. A gender-neutral job title, on the other hand, is one that does not specify or imply gender, such as firefighter or lawyer. In some cases it may be debatable whether a title is gender-specific; for example, chairman appears to denote a male (because of the ending -man), but the title is also applied sometimes to women.

Proponents of gender-neutral language generally advocate the use of gender-neutral job titles, particularly in contexts where the gender of the person in question is not known or not specified. For example, they prefer flight attendant to stewardess or steward, and police officer to policeman or policewoman. In some cases this may involve deprecating the use of certain specifically female titles (such as authoress), thus encouraging the use of the corresponding unmarked form (such as author) as a fully gender-neutral title.

The above applies to gender neutrality in English and in some other languages without grammatical gender (where grammatical gender is a feature of a language's grammar that requires every noun to be placed in one of several classes, often including feminine and masculine). In languages with grammatical gender, the situation is altered by the fact that nouns for people are often constrained to be inherently masculine or feminine, and the production of truly gender-neutral titles may not be possible. In such cases, proponents of gender-neutral language may instead focus on ensuring that feminine and masculine words exist for every job, and that they are treated with equal status.

The suffix -man had the meaning "person" in Old English (see man), but in present-day English it is predominantly masculine. Thus job titles that include this suffix, such as fireman, salesman and alderman, generally imply that the holder is male. While some of these job titles have feminine variants (e.g. alderwoman), others do not, because traditionally the positions in question were not occupied by women. For most such titles, gender-neutral equivalents now also exist, such as police officer (for policeman or policewoman), salesperson or sales representative (for salesman or saleswoman), etc. However, some proposed gender-neutral terms have not attained such common usage (as with fisher as an alternative to fisherman). Military ranks with the suffix -man normally remain unchanged when applied to females: for example, a woman serving in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers might be known as Craftsman Atkins.

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