GENDER-NEUTRAL OCCUPATION WORDS
What are we supposed to call the First Lady or the Second Lady who is a male? Are terms like “policemen” and “chairman” outdated? Read on to find out.
n the United States where equal rights matter a lot, many Americans may frown upon and even take offence at your choosing of the outdated terms to address certain professions that suggest a specific gender such as stewardess or firemen. In certain languages which have cognates with the old-fashioned English for the gender-specific variations or in regions that have yet to come to update the English textbooks that are based off of the American English system that we used decades ago in the United States, we can easily find words that can upset someone here.
If you would usually add a gender to an occupation name in your native language such as “female reporter,” “female president,” “male nurse,” “male chef,” or anything that suggests a gender, don’t attempt to make a direct translation from your language into English unless you want to appear like a person who came from the era when it first became acceptable for women to ride bicycles.
There are definitely some Americans out there that couldn’t care less whether you use gender-neutral terms or gender-specific terms, but your usage of gender-neutral terms will most likely not offend anyone, so we would say it’s always the smarter choice.
We’ve put together a few basic rules to neutralize some of the outdated versions.
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Whatever your political beliefs may be, you’d better admit that you’re at least slightly excited that we will be having a female vice president for the first time in our nation’s history.
As Kamala Harris is now the vice president-elect, we will naturally have a man filling in the position of Second Lady of the United States (SLOTUS) because her spouse, Douglas Emhoff, happens to be a male. Hence, it wouldn’t make any sense to call him the “Second Lady.”
For those of you who were expecting a “Second Dude,” as Hillary Clinton jokingly suggested in 2015 about Bill Clinton becoming the “First Dude” (video) if Hillary were to become the POTUS, we really won’t be seeing a “SDOTUS” acronym. The world will witness Douglas Emhoff become the nation’s first Second Gentleman of the United States (SGOTUS).
As we have also noticed that Wikipedia has changed its gender-specific “Second Lady of the United States (SLOTUS)” page to a “Second Spouse of the United States (SSOTUS)” page, we could assume that the gender-neutral term of the position is now Second Spouse of the United States (SSOTUS).
When the United States welcomes the president’s husband to the White House in the future for the first time, we would say it’s pretty safe to assume that he will be called the “First Gentleman of the United States (FGOTUS)” or the gender-neutral form “First Spouse of the United States (FSOTUS)” shall we all catch up with the times by then.
Words ending in –man or –woman
Most job titles that end in man or woman have been replaced with words that suit the occupation. If you think about it, people of any gender can be a meteorologist and the gender has absolutely nothing to do with the profession, so it only makes sense to call them for what they do. Well, at least a lot of us think so in the U.S.
Some of us may recall hearing the word “weatherman,” but many of us could probably agree that the term “weatherwoman” is virtually non-existent today and sounds cumbersome. As above, “meteorologist” and “weathercaster” are the standard terms now.
Below, you’ll see a few other job title that are the gender-specific terms in italic and the replaced gender-neutral terms in bold.
- weatherman meteorologist / weathercaster
- policeman police officer
- fireman firefighter
- chairman chairperson
- cameraman photographer
- salesman salesperson
Besides professions, we are seeing colleges starting to replace “freshmen” with “first-year students” to refer to… well, students in their first year as the gender-neutral version suggests.
Words ending in -ess
Long gone are the days we call the “flight attendant” a “steward” and a “stewardess.” You may still hear people in the older generation using the gender-specific variations because that’s what they’re used to, but we would feel pretty confident in saying that the gender-neutral version is now pretty much the standard. We wouldn’t be too surprised if a high-schooler today didn’t know the outdated “stewardess.”
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- steward / stewardess flight attendant
- waiter / waitress server
Some others take the original male form regardless of the person’s gender.
- actor / actress actor
- host / hostess host
Titles representing royal status remain gender-specific, but we don’t have a royal family in the U.S. to begin with.
- emperor / empress
- prince / princess
Other Neutralized Forms
Other titles including words such as boy or lady that specified gender have also been neutralized.
- bellboy bell captain / bell service
- paperboy paper carrier
- landlord / landlady owner
Think twice before using a word that contains gender-specific terms like man, woman, boy, girl, -ess. If you do a quick online search for the word along with “gender-neutral,” the chances are, you’ll find its updated version.
Your flight attendant may not pour hot coffee on you (as much as they may want to) for being called a steward or a stewardess, but they may very well restate your sentence by using the gender-neutral form. Did you notice that we used “they” to refer to a single flight attendant? Nope, that’s not a grammatical error. That’s another way you can see gender neutralization in modern English instead of saying he or she.
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