When I'm talking online, the people reading my posts probably don't know me, so it's best to not say anything that assumes that people will know I don't mean anything bad by it. ideas about female rights, Quark temporarily changes sexes to prove a point. So for the sake of those people, I'd rather avoid using the word if it's not too awkward to use an alternative, and there's almost always an acceptable alternative. Some people have been dehumanized by it for so long that this is a natural reaction for them. The procedure transforms Quark into a lovely female they call Lumba, and thanks to the hormones, an emotional wreck. That's why you see some people even in this thread who say that just seeing that word already raises eyebrows, makes them side-eye the speaker, or immediately get on guard. Even if I'm saying it in a situation where I think most people would know what I mean, I think a lot of women have seen that word used in a derogatory way for so long that just hearing it immediately raises a red flag in their heads. While context does matter, I'd prefer to err on the side of caution and avoid using it if it's at all possible that I may be misinterpreted, or if it's possible that I may bother someone with it. For example, going "men/women" or "male/female" is usually okay, but going "men/female" is weird.Ĭlick to shrink.I think while the push to avoid the word "female" has only become popular over the past few years, men have been calling women "females" in a dehumanizing way for at least a decade, meaning that there are plenty of women who grew up online, seeing the word thrown around all the time. Or at most, use it only when you're using the word for parallelism and not to give women weirdly specific treatment. These days, it's generally best to avoid using the word altogether in casual conversation, or only in very specific cases where it's already the fairly established term, and is known to not be derogatory (such as FeMC, or FemShep). It's still probably used in clinical or formal contexts (say, medical, legal, etc.), but it has fallen out of favor from being used casually because of these negative connotations that it's picked up over the years. That's why you get stuff like "first woman vice president", which is awkward grammatically, but (more importantly) avoids any possibility of looking like you're trying to dehumanize her. This is because incel/MRA types tend to use the word "female" as a way to deliberately distance or dehumanize women. We knew there were large numbers of female researchers doing remarkable work, and we asked associate editor Kathy A. Three years ago, Discover started a project to look into the question of how women fare in science. Using it as an adjective is grammatically correct, but there's been a trend to avoid using the word over the past decade or so. The list doesnt stop there, but the point is clear.