Most publishers are going to considerable lengths to promote gender-neutral job titles, their copy editors red-inking deviations from the new normal. They would have us believe that most of the new genderless job titles contrived by academics, or activists who have nestled into editorial offices, including those of dictionaries, will eventually win universal acceptance. I wonder.
Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of English job titles have always been —
and always will be — gender neutral. You have your cleaner, clerk, engineer, florist, hairdresser, pilot
or doctor, to name but a few. What varies is whether or not either of the sexes is prevalent
in any given profession in any given location, and how this influences our own expectations.
If a particular job is unevenly distributed among men and women, we instinctively feel the urge to add either 'male' or 'female' to the job title when clarification is deemed desirable. Because this can be awkward, yes — even in this day and age — it is hard to resist the temptation to make use of a gender-specific form when such a variant exists and is universally understood. There are times when a female patient might not wish to be seen by a male doctor, or a male patient by a female doctor.
Not so few of us still wonder why it is has become a misdemeanor to refer to a female flight attendant as a stewardess, a female sewing machine operator as a seamstress, a female server as a waitress, or for that matter a male nurse as a male nurse — given that men remain very much underrepresented in the nursing profession. The fact that surviving gender-specific names for a few professions are more word-economical and have greater informational value is indisputable.
If you then attempt an honest assessment of which job titles actually sound more appealing, perhaps ‘flight attendant’, ‘sewing machine operator’, and ‘server’ aren’t that cool after all. Furthermore, if we insist on calling our male chairman a ‘chairperson’ (or just a piece of furniture), and the male spokesman a ‘spokesperson’, then why not a horseman a ‘horseperson’? Should we go so far as to abolish surviving masculine nationality nouns and replace Englishman with the gender-inclusive ‘Englishperson’? The sky is the limit if you choose to go looking.
But wait. Even if we do all consent to having our language doctored in the prescribed manner, what are proponents of one-size-fits-all, fuzzy job titles hoping to do about the likes of French or German? The logical consequence of their reasoning would be to have entire European languages branded as backward on account of their grammatical genders. Across much of Europe there are feminine forms of the definite and indefinite articles, and people's titles and professions are regularly feminized with a suffix equivalent to the -ess that guardians of political correctness in the English-speaking world now take such exception to. No one could assert, however, that this supposedly sexist language has prevented either France or Germany from making greater strides toward gender equality than many an English-speaking country.
Interestingly, some francophone territories, as well as Germany, appear to be heading in exactly the opposite direction to us, although that doesn’t seem to matter as long as each contrarian approach is seen as progressive in its own locale. French-speaking Quebec, for instance, is actively promoting feminine job titles that previously didn't exist for certain professions traditionally dominated by men.
The liberal-minded Germans, meanwhile, have gone overboard, seizing every opportunity to insert a feminine plural job title ahead of each masculine (and hitherto non-gender-specific) equivalent in the name of equality. Even if the profession in question is male dominated, by convention it has to be 'ladies first', a ritual feminists are supposed to despise. Hence, German public broadcasters now usually replace the officially recognized gender-inclusive form for soldiers, Soldaten, with Soldatinnen und Soldaten, i.e. ‘soldieresses and soldiers’.
It is no exaggeration to say that the good ‘citizenesses’ and citizens of Germany have been torn apart over the issue. Especially controversial is the all-in-one written form Soldat*innen, which in English would mean writing ‘soldier*esses’ every time we mentioned soldiers, God forbid. The asterisk separating the masculine noun from its feminizing plural suffix represents the tiny minority of the population considering itself non-binary, so that it too won't feel left out.
This all shows how far things can go when ‘woke’ runs amok and ignores mainstream public opinion.
Perhaps it is time to take a step back, view things in perspective, and stop taking ourselves so seriously. If your mail is brought to you by a male man, then it is still fine by me (and I guess, my next-door neighbor) to speak of the mailman (or postman) rather than ‘mail carrier’, which could just as well be the postal service itself. If your next drink is served up by a barmaid, the chances are she'll prove more tender than a bartender, less clinical than a ‘mixologist’. And if the star of that next box-office success just happens to be female, there is no commonsense reason to postpone appreciation of this propitious circumstance by referring to her as an actor instead of an actress. Unless, of course, you yourself want to.
The bottom line has to be our right of free expression.
