With humans, that's an adjective, not a noun.
So, one of my coworkers today starts a conversation with "what you have to understand about females is--"
Without asking permission of the rest of me, my mouth interrupts there with "nothing good has ever followed an opening like that." I would have told my mouth to go for it, mind; it just would have been nice for it to ask.
I then proceed to explain to this coworker that it is not acceptable to refer to women as "females" instead of "women". I don't think he got it.
In the meantime, the back of my brain is going "see, more and more I understand why something like 60% of women engineers leave the field within 5 years of graduation." (Don't depend on that for hard numbers; that's just pulled out of my memory from somewhere.)
Now, I know this is not typical of men as a group. Not that anything really is or even can be typical of 'men' as a group. There's 3 billion of them. That's too big of a group to have a 'typical'. Hell, there's 150 million of them in this country alone. Too big for a typical.
No, to the contrary... Well, how do I put this politely? There are a few people, over-represented in my industry, who are from a different generation and because of their position and professions have not been encouraged to adopt the social advancements most of society has made. So they will say things like "what you have to understand about females is", and sometimes they will then feel ambiguously embarrassed when my red hair pops up over the cubical wall, and sometimes they won't even get that.
This got me thinking, though. Comparatively speaking, how often do you hear a woman refer to men as "males"? Have you heard the phrase "what you have to understand about males is"?
I have heard one woman speak that way. That same woman also thinks that "drowned" and "born" are the present tense and has thus been heard to say "drownded" and "borned" for past tense. She is also, interestingly enough, a member of that same generation and also due to her (different) position/profession has not been encouraged to adopt social advancements.
However, I can only think of the one woman. I personally have heard men use "females" to refer to women far more often than I have heard women use "males" to refer to men. Of course, I also work in a very biased environment. So, those of you who live out in the real world? Yes? No? What do you think?
Without asking permission of the rest of me, my mouth interrupts there with "nothing good has ever followed an opening like that." I would have told my mouth to go for it, mind; it just would have been nice for it to ask.
I then proceed to explain to this coworker that it is not acceptable to refer to women as "females" instead of "women". I don't think he got it.
In the meantime, the back of my brain is going "see, more and more I understand why something like 60% of women engineers leave the field within 5 years of graduation." (Don't depend on that for hard numbers; that's just pulled out of my memory from somewhere.)
Now, I know this is not typical of men as a group. Not that anything really is or even can be typical of 'men' as a group. There's 3 billion of them. That's too big of a group to have a 'typical'. Hell, there's 150 million of them in this country alone. Too big for a typical.
No, to the contrary... Well, how do I put this politely? There are a few people, over-represented in my industry, who are from a different generation and because of their position and professions have not been encouraged to adopt the social advancements most of society has made. So they will say things like "what you have to understand about females is", and sometimes they will then feel ambiguously embarrassed when my red hair pops up over the cubical wall, and sometimes they won't even get that.
This got me thinking, though. Comparatively speaking, how often do you hear a woman refer to men as "males"? Have you heard the phrase "what you have to understand about males is"?
I have heard one woman speak that way. That same woman also thinks that "drowned" and "born" are the present tense and has thus been heard to say "drownded" and "borned" for past tense. She is also, interestingly enough, a member of that same generation and also due to her (different) position/profession has not been encouraged to adopt social advancements.
However, I can only think of the one woman. I personally have heard men use "females" to refer to women far more often than I have heard women use "males" to refer to men. Of course, I also work in a very biased environment. So, those of you who live out in the real world? Yes? No? What do you think?