Female
[5][6] The word female comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning "woman", by way of the Old French femelle.
[7] Originally, from its first appearance in the 1300s, female exclusively referred to humans and always indicated that the speaker spoke of a woman or a girl.
[6] The word can also refer to the shape of connectors and fasteners, such as screws, electrical pins, and technical equipment.
The concept is not limited to animals; egg cells are produced by chytrids, diatoms, water moulds and land plants, among others.
[citation needed] Species that are divided into females and males are classified as gonochoric in animals, as dioecious in seed plants[23] and as dioicous in cryptogams.
[25] In a few species, female individuals coexist with males and hermaphrodites; this sexual system is called trioecy.
[32] Some non-mammalian species, such as guppies, have analogous reproductive structures; and some other non-mammals, such as some sharks, also bear live young.
[33] Following experiments by French endocrinologist Alfred Jost in the 1940s, it is widely believed that the female is the default sex in mammalian sexual determination.
Other species (such as the goby) can transform, as adults, from one sex to the other in response to local reproductive conditions (such as a brief shortage of males).
The bacterium can only be transmitted via infected ova, and the presence of the obligate endoparasite may be required for female sexual viability.
Being male can also carry significant costs, such as in flashy sexual displays in animals (such as big antlers or colorful feathers), or needing to produce an outsized amount of pollen as a plant in order to get a chance to fertilize a female.
[40]: 222 Although sexual evolution emerged at least 1.2 billion years ago, the lack of anisogamous fossil records make it hard to pinpoint when females evolved.
This hypothesis is unlikely to apply to a significant number of species, but natural selection in general has some role in female genital evolution.
[43] The symbol ♀ (Unicode: U+2640 Alt codes: Alt+12), a circle with a small cross underneath, is commonly used to represent females.
Joseph Justus Scaliger once speculated that the symbol was associated with Venus, goddess of beauty, because it resembles a bronze mirror with a handle,[44] but modern scholars consider that fanciful, and the most established view is that the female and male symbols derive from contractions in Greek script of the Greek names of the planets Thouros (Mars) and Phosphoros (Venus).
