Historically, the efforts of turning English into a more gender-sensitive language have been caused by the lack of visibility for women in the professional world. Many words that described occupations contained the suffix -man because these professional fields were at some point almost exclusively held by men. Consider words like businessman, chairman, or policeman. Even though most of these professional fields are not predominantly male anymore, some of these words are still used when referring to people of different genders. Some linguists call this type of word “male-biased” or “gender-biased”. In this particular context, by male or gender bias, they mean an at most times unconscious implicit belief that an undefined person is a man. This conflation of men with humanity was proven by multiple psycholinguistic experiments: most people imagine a man when seeing a title of a profession containing this particular suffix, especially if the occupation is stereotypically held by men, i.e. fireman. This contradicts the assumption that the suffix -man is inclusive to all genders.

Exposure to gender stereotypes can have a significant impact on thoughts and behaviors. This influence has motivated society to develop standards eliminating bias and to avoid practices contributing to this bias. One such standard is to eliminate gender-biased language, particularly language containing the suffix -man, and to replace it with more gender-neutral terms.

Feminine gender markers in nouns such as suffixes –ess, -enne, or –ette are currently in decline. Several words like actress or waitress are still often used, but the suffixes are not considered productive anymore, which means that speakers don’t use them regularly to create new words. Words like authoress or songstress as well as comedienne are considered diminishing and can be rarely found in texts.

Research shows that gender-neutral words are highly important in reducing stereotypes and implicit discrimination. Most of the examples shown below are already widespread and many people don’t even notice when they are using a gender-neutral equivalent of a «male-biased» word.

Gender-marked	Gender-neutral
chairman	chair
fireman	firefighter
policeman	police officer
salesman, saleswoman	salesperson
postman, postwoman	postal worker, mail carrier
steward, stewardess	flight attendant
cameraman	camera operator
crewman	crew member
doorman	door keeper
handyman	maintenance person, fixer
weatherman	meteorologist
stuntman	stuntperson

In other words containing generic man, it can be easily replaced with human.

Example:

mankind	humanity
man-made	human-made, in some contexts artificial

Example:
In cases of generic use of man and men they can be replaced with one, anybody, everybody, somebody, individuals, etc.

Example:

Not only words containing -men can be exclusive. Consider concepts like sisterhood/brotherhood as well as sorority/fraternity. Depending on the context, they could be replaced with one of the following: camaraderie, guild, affiliation, club, fellowship, house, kinship, order and society.