The Semantic Derogation of Female

As Schulz (1975) observed decades ago, terms of reference can reflect a range of underlying ideological assumptions. One of her examples of this phenomenon is the lexical choice between freedom fighter and terrorist (p. 64), with the former reflective of positive appraisals and the latter a far more negative one. Schulz goes on to discuss the phenomenon she labels “the semantic derogation of women” whereby once neutral terms of reference undergo pejoration; part of the discussion compares terms like lady with its male counterpart gentleman, with the former undergoing pejoration in many contexts but not the latter. I first became aware of this phenomenon sometime during 2020, with regard to terms of reference for women when I observed people replying to online posts which described women as females with entirely textless responses consisting solely of pictures of an alien race from the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. These aliens are caricatures of capitalism and misogyny, and they themselves refer to women as females. I interpreted these interactions to mean those who posted these pictures of the fictitious aliens were signalling shared gender ideology with the Star Trek aliens.

However, “terminally online” behaviour like this often does not necessarily translate into real-world discursive patterns. I next asked many of the women in my life their reactions to hearing women referred to as female(s). While there was some variation in response, quite a few reported that this was a red flag for them, and men who did this, in their experience, were either dangerous or toxic. I followed up on these observations with an informal sampling of friends and coworkers, and the results were suggestive of female as a lexical variant which had undergone semantic derogation. Later in 2021, I conducted a qualitative analysis of the online communications of a misogynistic online Pickup Artist community which utilized this lexical variant frequently. However, while some findings were suggestive of such an analysis, they were ultimately inconclusive as within that insular community, one manner of referring to women seemed as hostile as any other.

The present study continues this examination of what I have come to refer to as the conspicuous female. Specifically, I characterise it as a lexical variant for women which, when it occurs outside of clinical contexts, seems to carry ideological baggage. To this end, I approach the question from a different direction than my earlier project, which was small in scale and purely qualitative in analysis. First, I re-administer an earlier survey on attitudes towards this lexical variant with a larger sample and a wider age range than in my previous research. Secondly, I mine Twitter using keyword searches for a reasonably large corpus of tweets containing the targeted variant, female, and a variant which is less negatively charged, woman. The choice of this second, more innocuous variant, was decided based on results from the attitudinal survey. The Twitter data are analyzed using the tools of critical discourse analysis (van Dijk 2005), for content which indexes prejudicial ideologies as well as quantitative variationist methodology (Bayley 2019).