If a woman is swept off a ship into the water, the cry is `Man overboard!' If she is killed by a hit-and-run driver, the charge is `manslaughter.' If she is injured on the job, the coverage is `workmen's compensation.' But if she arrives at a threshold marked `Men Only,' she knows the admonition is not intended to bar animals or plants or inanimate objects. It is meant for her --- Alma Graham
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistics states that the limits of
human thought are determined by the nature and the structure of the
language in which thought occurs. One corollary, on which this
chapter is based, is that the English language's use of gender forces
people to think in terms of male and female, with its gender-specific
third-person singular pronouns and its different titles, in some
cases, for males and females.
While it is not necessarily bad to be
immediately aware of the sex of someone being discussed, the
connotation of male and female terms differ so greatly that the
distinction not only implies difference but inequality. Biases in
language are important because they show both the biases people hold
and how they are communicated.