Generally Accepted Writing Conventions
Proponents of gender-neutral job titles believe they 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 genders 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, advocates believe gender can be attached to the title as appropriate (chairman or chairwoman).
Sometimes this formulation can lead to hyper-correcting 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 describe the person occupying the chair.
Proponents believe 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, poetess, and aviatrix. If gender is relevant, they believe that 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"). However, when a female is in the office of "the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod," it was changed to "the Usher of the Black Rod" in Canada.
Terms such as "male nurse," "male model," or "female judge" are often used when the gender is irrelevant. Many advisors on non-sexist usage therefore deprecate them, saying that the statement of exception indicates that a worker of that gender is somehow an ersatz member of that profession. (Woody Allen jokes that his sister was the first woman to be a male nurse in New York.)
Read more about this topic: Gender-specific Job Title
Famous quotes containing the words generally accepted, generally, accepted, writing and/or conventions:
“It’s the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimulates every thing to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”
—Thomas Mann (18751955)
“It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)