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What is the unisex form of a word like fisherman? Do you have to use fisherman and fisherwoman separately, or is fisherperson acceptable? I couldn’t find a dictionary with the word …

In general, what do you do when a word does not have a unisex form?

herisson
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notablytipsy
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7 Answers7

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There really is no general rule. Language evolves, and the evolution is primarily influenced by the people using the word, and different communities have different ways of thinking, so the “unisex” solutions turn out to be different for different words.

There is a critical distinction to be drawn here between at least three kinds of gender-neutral language.

  • One is grammatical neutrality: this is easy in English but hard in many languages. For example, moon has no grammatical gender in English, but is feminine in French (la lune) and masculine in German (der Mond). Nevertheless, a few words in English sometimes take particular gender pronouns: earth, moon, and nature, for example, certain moral qualities (such as wisdom and justice), and certain forms of transportation (such as ships and automobiles), are sometimes feminine and take the pronoun she. You might describe this as personification. Another term for it, according to the Wikipedia article “Gender in English”, is covert gender.

  • A second kind is etymological neutrality: language that contains no possible ambiguity, because it avoids root words that could be mistaken to mean only people who identify as a particular gender. In English, we rely more and more on such terms: attendant, parenthood, letter carrier, not stewardess, motherhood, fatherhood, postman.

  • A third kind is connotative neutrality: language having grammatical or etymological roots in a gender, but nevertheless used and understood to connote nothing about gender: manslaughter, freshman class, maiden voyage, master key, fraternal twins, lumberjack, matriculate.

In the fishing industry, the gender-neutral term actually used most is fisherman, plural fishermen. The term is neutral in the first and third sense, but not the second. It is grammatically neutral, neutral in connotation, but not neutral in etymology, much like freshman and lumberjack.

There was a campaign in Canada to adopt the word fisher, but the women in the profession largely refused to have anything to do with it:

[F]ederal efforts to replace fisherman with fisher in government documents, coupled with a high-profile Supreme Court decision on native fishing rights, caused a riptide of dissent over what to call people who fish. To complicate matters, many women in the industry didn’t want their job title changed and insisted on being called fishermen.¹

It is certainly possible that the preference for fisherman as the gender-neutral term will diminish as time passes. Over the past thirty years, the use of many such words has become less common. As of this writing, fisher has not yet caught on in occupational or popular usage. Some academics and governmental agencies now use the term fisher, and this may eventually influence the public. See for example the conclusion of the recent Australian Broadcasting Corporation article, “Is ‘fishermen’ a sexist and exclusionary term?” But only time will tell whether fisher really will catch on.

MetaEd
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    FWIW, I heard a female WNBA coach admonishing her female players to "Make sure you guard your man. We aren't playing zone defense here." – Robusto Jul 27 '12 at 16:31
  • Nice answer. Definitely gives me something interesting to think about :) – notablytipsy Jul 27 '12 at 16:31
  • There's a WP page that provides a nice overview of this ... situation. – coleopterist Jul 27 '12 at 16:35
  • @coleopterist Yes, I knew of chairperson, which is why this question came to mind :) – notablytipsy Jul 27 '12 at 16:38
  • @asymptotically you mean the chairman? – Ryan Oct 30 '14 at 20:00
  • @MetaEd, your accepted answer was suitable in 2012. Now five years later, at the cutting edge of language around gender, it is no longer enough to just say that it the accepted term is 'fisherman' has always been 'fisherman' and that even women in the industry prefer 'fisherman.' The question was: Is there a gender-neutral form of fisherman? – Wes Modes Feb 08 '18 at 20:16
  • @WesModes I reviewed the answer, and it did seem to need updating. See what you think. – MetaEd Feb 08 '18 at 23:38
  • @metaed, thank you for your thoughtful addition. If I had to put money on it, I'd say Fisher will never catch on. I bet fisherman will be eventually replaced with fisherperson, a word that sounds strange in our mouths here in 2017. Yet we think nothing these days of serviceperson, salesperson, chairperson. For inspiration on that journey, we can look to what we might guess is a hopelessly gender-bound institution, the US Marines: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/marines-gender-neutral-job-titles – Wes Modes Feb 10 '18 at 22:57
  • Actually, there is a gender neutral way of saying 'fisherman'. 'Fisher' - One of Beatrice Potter's stories for children is called "Jeremy Fisher". We have footballers, golfers. But MetaEd is basically correct. It will take plain evolution to get to where we need to be. – Tuffy Aug 26 '19 at 20:25
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I have worked in the high seas commercial fishing industry my entire life. All the women I have met who fish for a living will admonish and correct you for calling them "fisherwoman". We work hard for our title and that is Fisherman.

E. Vanderpool
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  • Genuinely curious question: Are you a fishermen yourself and do you think there is any possibility of internalized sexism in women preferring the term fisherman? Put another way, do you think the high demands of the occupation and its rep of being an exclusive fraternity means that, once accepted, women prefer to display their badge of entry into this fraternity? – Wes Modes Dec 18 '17 at 23:47
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    The only time I ever heard the word “fischerwoman” was in theoretical discussions such as this one. I have never actually seen a person in my life referred to as a “fisherwoman”, always simply “fisherman” for either sex. I did not know the word even existed until I was 20 and when I first was apprised in a discussion such as this I was surprised that it was actually in dictionaries. – Zorf Dec 20 '20 at 14:59
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Man has always been used in a gender-neutral way per Merriam-Webster. Until the arguably over-sensitive demands of feminism since the 1960s, words like fisherman or chairman were readily accepted as non-specific as to gender. As a result, the natural plural was the usual men. Continued use is therefore a matter of bravery!

MetaEd
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Tony Balmforth
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    Indeed so! The OED’s very first sense of man is “A human being (irrespective of sex or age); = L. homo. In OE. the prevailing sense.” Just so, the nearest relative to genus Pan, the chimpanzees and bonobos, is genus Homo, best translated as just plain *man, not as men and women. It’s like how an ombudsman can be a woman, or how in German “Mann sagt” doesn’t exclude women. If a husbandman* is a farmer who tills the soil, they don’t turn into a *husbandwoman just because they’re female. (Don’t misstep to the wrong etymon on homosexual, though: it’s not all about men. :) – tchrist Jul 27 '12 at 18:02
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    It is true, but misleading, to say that "man" has always been used in a gender-neutral way. "Man" has been used in both a gender-neutral way and a gender-specific way since the late 13C when "wer" fell out of use. – MetaEd Jul 27 '12 at 19:08
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    @MetaEd I am happy to accept the correction. – Tony Balmforth Jul 27 '12 at 19:31
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    I heard someone say it this way once: "Remember, there are two kinds of man: there's male man, and female man." – J.R. Jul 28 '12 at 05:00
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    Editorialize much? Previous to those "over-sensitive demands of feminism" this kind of language squirreliness allowed our very language to reinforce a sexist status quo. Those demands of feminism have challenged language norms and moved us forward as a culture toward less exclusionary language. – Wes Modes Dec 18 '17 at 23:42
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I think the use of the word "Angler" would be appropriate.

an•gler (ˈæŋ glər)

n. 1. a person who fishes with a hook and line

Glen Livet
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    Angling is much more specific than fishing; I daresay most people who fish for a living do not do so by angling. – Hellion Apr 15 '13 at 21:11
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Once you've adopted a term and have used it commonly for most of your life, it becomes normal, no matter how inappropriate or flawed it may be. Because you know and live it so commonly you don't really have to think about it... It just is...

So when you change it all of a sudden you have to think about it every time. You reference it and everything about whenever it's spoken or used in a document becomes thinking that wasn't needed before. That's very stressful and that's why people resist learning new ways of doing old things they've done all their lives. It causes stress. And who wants to stress out about something they never had to before?

It's better to leave it as is for the people accustomed to it and make the changes apply to new staff. The next generation of fishing professionals that now only know it the way that's correct.

Hellion
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Paul
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I can't believe nobody's given this answer, so I guess I will. I'd just simply say "fisher."

Benjamin Harman
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I don't think there’s a single definitive solution.

Most commonly, the suffix -men is used for the plural. The somewhat ungainly phrase “[term]men and women” (e.g., “fishermen and women”) can be used to make the inclusivity explicit.

MetaEd
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anu
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