Socialism bad...

@KiwiBird I think "Madame la professeure" is a good compromise.
It's great that "teacher" in English is perceived as gender-neutral, instead of male. Most professional titles appear to work like this.
An exception is "actor/actrice", right?

@helenS [quote]An exception is "actor/actrice"[/quote]
Actor - actress.
Not so often these days. The use of the feminine of agent nouns in -or is declining in English, at least in print. Others like operator, calculator, etc., have always used only the -or form. In fact for the moment actor/actress is the only one that I can think of. I'm not sure of the etymology of all of them, perhaps actor/actress is the only one derived directly from French.

The Wikipedia page for Helen Mirren refers to her in the first sentence as an [i]actor[/i], but the footer includes links to pages using actress such as: [i]20th century English actresses[/i].

@ninalanyon Thank you! 🌷
And yes, actress, of course. Actrice is French.
And, in French, a "calculatrice" is a pocket calculator 😄

@helenS Someone beat me to it...
For a while the terms male actor and female actor were in vogue although the usage of these terms is now rare and just [b]Actor[/b]

However in the Academy Awards they still have Best Actor and Best Actress and a very entrenched boys club....

@KiwiBird "Madame la professeure" makes sense because the suffix "-eur" derives from Latin "-or", which was gender neutral, and the final "e" in "-eure" is silent.

Isn't it nice that this has become a linguistics discussion! 😜

@helenS Socialism has a lot to answer for. ❤

@KiwiBird I think history has already decided where socialism must be put:

[center]Socialism[/center]
[center]⬇︎[/center]
[center]🗑[/center]
Sad but true. 😐

@helenS In English, in the days before electronic computers a calculator was a person who performed arithmetic calculations usually for engineering or science projects. Nevil Shute, the author of On the Beach and A Town Like Alice and many other novels was chief calculator on the R100 airship project [1]. He oversaw a department whose job it was to calculate the stresses on the airframe, as far as I remember most of those doing the actual arithmetic were women operating simple mechanical calculating machines.

[1]See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_Rule:_Autobiography_of_an_Engineer

@helenS [quote] in French, a "calculatrice" is a pocket calculator[/quote]
Interesting, how is the gender of new words determined in French?

@ninalanyon Thank you – to me a "calculator" has always been a little machine that does – well, calculate. But yes, a person who calculates is a calculator. The usage shift is interesting.

Regarding the gender of French "calculatrice", I'm afraid I don't know why.
English "a computer" translates to "un ordinateur" or "un calculateur (!!!) electronic", or even "le computeur". Maybe because computers used to be big and powerful machines, so they had to be male. Sexism in language, perhaps.

"email" is male, in French: "J'ai reçu un e-mail de mon ami."

It's language! 😜