Gender symbol

A gender symbol is a pictogram or glyph used to represent either biological sex or sociological gender (a terminological distinction originating in 1950s sociology) in either biology, medicine, genealogy or selective breeding, or in sociology, gender politics, LGBT subculture and identity politics.

Pictograms used to indicate male and female public toilets became widely used beginning in the 1960s.

The two standard sex symbols are the Mars symbol ♂ for male and Venus symbol ♀ for female, derived from astrological symbols, denoting the classical planets Mars and Venus, respectively. They were first used to denote the effective sex of plants (i.e. sex of individual in a given crossbreed, since most plants are hermaphroditic) by Carl Linnaeus in 1751.

They are still used in scientific publications to indicate the sex of an individual, for example of a patient.Pedigree charts published in scientific papers now more commonly use a square for male and a circle for female.

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