What do you prefer to be called?
Following on from Hull Council’s email that women must be called women and not ladies or anything else, we ran our own poll to see what you think.
The results are:
| Woman | 16% |
| Lady | 19% |
| Girl | 49% |
| None of these | 16% |
If we were all to adapt the policy Hull laid out, this means that 84% of women, ladies, girls or people of the female persuasion would not be very happy, which just goes to show that the whole thing isn’t that simple.
Hull came up with several more words one isn’t supposed to use which were taken from a list adopted from a manual Diversity in Diction, Equality in Action: A Guide to Appropriate Use of Language published by the TUC and Unison.
This guide seeks to clarify what is offensive language and what is not to clear up any confusion. It reminds us of the need to be sensitive to the possible offence language can cause.
According to the Collins English Dictionary, the word “girl” may be used informally to describe “a woman of any age,” where as the term “lady” is used in part as “a polite name for a woman.”
Perhaps we can deduce from the results of the Deskdemon poll that more people now have a natural preference towards informal and friendly language over the more formal.
You can read the whole guide by clicking here.
