Жұмыс атауларындағы гендерлік белгілер

Name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job

A gender specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job titles stewardess and seamstress imply that the person is female, whilst the corresponding job titles steward and seamster imply that the person is male. A gender neutral job title, on the other hand, is one that does not specify or imply gender, such as firefighter or lawyer. In some cases, it may be debatable whether a title is gender specific; for example, chairman appears to denote a male (because of the ending man), but the title is also applied sometimes to women. Proponents of gender neutral language generally advocate the use of gender neutral job titles, particularly in contexts where the gender of the person in question is not known or not specified. For example, they prefer flight attendant to stewardess or steward, and police officer to policeman or policewoman. In some cases this may involve deprecating the use of certain specifically female titles (such as authoress), thus encouraging the use of the corresponding unmarked form (such as author) as a fully gender neutral title. The above applies to gender neutrality in English and in some other languages without grammatical gender (where grammatical gender is a feature of a language's grammar that requires every noun to be placed in one of several classes, often including feminine and masculine). In languages with grammatical gender, the situation is altered by the fact that nouns for people are often constrained to be inherently masculine or feminine, and the production of truly gender neutral titles may not be possible. In such cases, proponents of gender neutral language may instead focus on ensuring that feminine and masculine words exist for every job, and that they are treated with equal status.

The case for switching to gender neutral job titles usually makes an ideological argument, that gender specific job titles at some level promote sexism in the workplace. For example, fire chiefs have argued that when the public uses the term "fireman" instead of "firefighter", it reinforces the popular image that firefighting is only a job for men, and thus makes it difficult for them to recruit women and those who reject the gender binary. Studies found that people assume maleness when they read job titles with man, and they found that women were less likely to apply to jobs that used man in their application. This produced words like doctress and professoress and even lawyeress, Canada and increasingly in the UK. For example, the boards of most Fortune 500 companies in the United States are presided over by a "chairman" and also the overwhelming majority of the (FTSE 100) companies in the United Kingdom have a "chairman", while committees in the United States House of Representatives are presided over by a "chair", as of 2009. Since most of these are, however, men, a more correct description of the current language situation needs to consider use in organizations whose chairperson is a woman or non binary person. Less than half of the members of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel accept the use of the word chairman in describing a woman. Some usage guides, such as The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, advocate gender neutral language in circumstances where all sexes are meant to be included. For instance, a business might advertise that it is looking for a new chair or chairperson rather than chairman. Gender neutral language discourages chairman, on the grounds that some readers would assume women and those of other genders are implicitly excluded from responding to an advertisement using this word. Feminist Philosophy of Language, a guide on sexism in language and feminist language reform, also discourages the usage of man and man as gender neutral because it has male bias and erases women under a masculine word. They also discourage titles like "lady doctor" because it makes men the default and implies that the ability and competence of workers, in this case a doctor, are dependent on their sex.

Proponents of gender neutral job titles believe that such titles should be used, especially when referring to hypothetical persons. For example, firefighter instead of fireman; mail carrier, letter carrier, or post worker rather than mailman; flight attendant instead of steward or stewardess; bartender instead of barman or barmaid. In the rare case where no useful gender neutral alternative is available, they believe both male and female terms should be used. Proponents of gender neutral language advocate the use of a neuter form when/where appropriate. For example, a company may seek to fill a vacancy and hire a new chairperson. Since a gendered individual doesn't currently hold the position, its title reverts to a neuter form. Once that position is filled, many advocates believe gender can be attached to the title as appropriate (chairman or chairwoman). Sometimes this formulation can lead to inconsistent gender specific usage, in which women become chairpersons but men remain chairmen. Some women opt to use the word chairman in preference to chairwoman, subject to the style Madam or Mister prefixing the title, which they perceive to be gender neutral by itself. Particularly in academia, the word Chair is often used to designate the person chosen to oversee the agenda at meetings of an organized group. The principle of gender neutral language dictates that job titles that add suffixes to make them feminine should be avoided. For example, "usher", not "usherette"; "comedian", not "comedienne". Some of these are almost entirely obsolete now, such as sculptress, authoress, poetess, and aviatrix. If gender is relevant, the words woman or female should be used instead of "lady" ("my grandmother was the first female doctor in the province"), except if the masculine is "lord" (as in "landlady"). In the case of landlord or landlady, it may be preferable to find an equivalent title with the same meaning, such as proprietor or lessor. However, when a female is in the office of "the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod", it is changed to "the Lady Usher of the Black Rod" or simply "Usher of the Black Rod", as in Canada. Advisors on non sexist usage deprecate terms such as "male nurse", "female doctor", "male model", or "female judge" because such terms are often used when the gender and sex is irrelevant.

When words have a grammatical gender associated with them, in many languages, they may impose morphological requirements to maintain sentence agreement. That is, there is a non political content to the word changes, or inflection. Nevertheless, gender identification word endings are sometimes dropped, something that happened often in the former East Germany, for example. Sometimes an entirely new or etymologically unrelated word is coined. For example, when men in France wanted to become midwives, which up until then was an exclusively female occupation, they chose not to adapt the existing term sage femme ('wise woman'), and instead coined maïeuticien.