KEY VOCAB

• Sex

  The biological differences between males and females divided based on their reproductive systems
• gender

  differences between males and females when considering social and cultural differences rather than biological
• gender roles

  All the things a person says or does to disclose themselves as having the status as a man, woman or something else
• Address terms

  Men are usually only ‘Mr’ whereas women can be ‘mrs’ ‘Ms’ or ’Miss’ why does marital status only apply to women?
• Diminutive suffixes

  Using ‘Ess’ or ‘ette’ on the ends of words to make them ‘feminine’
• generic terms

  ‘man’ and ’he’ are used to mean all people
• lexical asymmetry


  pairs of words which seem to be equal (sir/madam) often are not, with the female term having been degraded in some way
• marked terms

  we have to say ‘female doctor’ because we assume doctors are men, same with ‘male nurse’ because nurses are assumed to be female
• semantic fields

  terms for women often derive from items of food, clothing or animals