Even after writing and speaking about marketing to women for all these years, I must admit I still have trouble confidently deciding which of these words to use: "female" vs. "woman" or "gender" vs. "sex." Of course, for some inexplicable reason, I have never taken the time to look it up myself.


Soooo.. it was a pleasant surprise to see that William Safire tackled it in his "On Language" columnin last weekend's New York Times Magazine. Thanks, William. (And thanks to the woman who emailed him about it!)
The most obvious examples of the use or mis-use of "female" vs. "woman" are in politics these days. Is Hillary Clinton running to be the first woman president or the first female president? Is Nancy Pelosi the first woman speaker or the first female speaker of the House?
Here's what Safire says:

"Both words can function as nouns, but female, unlike woman, can also be an adjective. " He goes on to demonstrate the difference when using those two terms as adjectives: "Adjectives are by their nature stretchable, happily taking 'more' or 'less': you can say 'more female,' but you cannot say 'more woman'; you would have to say 'more womanly.'"

Further along in the piece, Safire solicits the input of Deborah Tannen, my favorite socio-linguist (and author of You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation), who also seems to be hearing woman more often as an adjective. Tannen admits that she herself avoids using female since it sounds "as if I'm treating the people I'm referring to as mammals but not humans."
I agree with Tannen, and, like her, have been avoiding the use of female as an adjective -- but no more! (or, at least I'll try to be more aware of it)
The entire piece is worth reading (and perhaps posting on a company bulletin board) if you are involved in marketing to women, and is all the more the case if you are in an industry or business environment that still, even occasionally, refers to women as "ladies." (Egads.) In this day and age, most of the women I know would say that that 1950s-sounding word has an especially negative or condescending connotation.
We are all guilty. The devil is in the details and proper use of language.