GENDER

GENDER. A grammatical distinction, in which such PARTS OF SPEECH as nouns, adjectives, and determiners are marked as MASCULINE and FEMININE (as in French and Spanish), or masculine, feminine, and NEUTER (as in German, Latin, and Greek). In such languages, these parts of speech when being used together must agree in gender: the feminine endings in the LATIN phrases illae feminae bonae (nominative: those good women), masculine endings in illi viri boni (nominative: those good men) and neuter endings in illa oppida bona (nominative: those good towns). Distinctions in grammatical gender match some but not all natural gender distinctions and extend them to many items which have no natural gender: French une pierre, a stone (feminine). There can sometimes be considerable discrepancies between grammatical and natural gender: German das Mädchen (the girl) and das Kind (the child) are both neuter.

In English, grammatical distinctions of gender are mainly confined to the third-person singular PRONOUNS, personal, reflexive, and possessive (she/her/hers/herself versus he/him/his/himself). The terms non-personal, and neuter are used for it/its/itself. A contrast of personal and non-personal is also found with the relative pronouns who/whom versus which. She/her is widely used to refer to a ship or other means of transport (She runs well before the wind), to a country (England will never forget those who gave up their lives for her), and sometimes to machines (She sounds rough; maybe the engine needs tuning). A baby or young child (especially when the sex is not known) is sometimes referred to as it: ‘You don't have to hit a child to abuse it’ (charity advertisement). Plural they/them is genderless, being used for people and things. Its use with singular reference for people (Ask anybody and they'll tell you), a historically well-established usage which operates against the strict rules of concord, is common, especially in spoken language, but arouses controversy and is considered a solecism by purists.

Some natural-gender distinctions between pairs of nouns show a derivational relationship (bride/bridegroom, hero/heroine), but most have no morphological connection (father/mother, uncle/aunt, mare/stallion). Some feminine endings are criticized as pejorative and sexist, especially by feminists: authoress, poetess, usherette, stewardess appear to be more disliked than actress, waitress. In recent years, conscious attempts have been made to use the unmarked or masculine term for both sexes: with little difficulty in such statements as Emily Dickinson is a great poet, more controversially in She's a waiter/steward. Such awkward usages are often avoided by neutral or unisex terms like flight attendant. Where terms exist that include -man (as in chairman), non-sexist alternatives like chairperson, chair are controversial and unstable, especially in the UK, although they are making some headway in the US. See GENDER BIAS, NOUN, SEXISM.