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.
[1] Thus job titles that include this suffix, such as fireman, salesman and alderman, generally imply that the holder is male.
[2] For most such titles, gender-neutral equivalents now also exist, such as police officer, salesperson or sales representative (for salesman or saleswoman), etc.
Military ranks with the suffix -man normally remain unchanged when applied to women: for example, a woman serving in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers might be known as Craftsman Atkins.
Examining the Time magazine corpus (texts from the 1920s to the 2000s), researcher Maria Bovin found:[3] The usage of the neutral term fire fighter has increased, starting in the 1980s.
In the 1990s, the frequency of usage is lower, but it is also evident from the rows showing the total instances of all of the terms that the overall mentioning of the professionals in this line of work was less frequent in this decade.
Other gender-neutral terms have therefore been proposed, such as server (alternatives include waitron, waitstaff or waitperson), though these are rarely used outside North America.
[5] In an examination of "business-related titles" such as businessman and business people, "overall usage of these terms seems to have decreased since the 1960s" when examining Time magazine: When "looking specifically at the difference between the gender-marked titles and the gender-neutral ones, businessperson(s) and businesspeople, there has been an increase usage of the neutral businesspeople (if all spelling variations are included).
"[6] Origin of the word "master" are late Old English: "a man having control or authority; a teacher or tutor", from Latin magister (n.), a contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") meaning "chief, head, director, teacher", and the source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister.
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.
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.
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.
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.