Woman

Woman is one of the two binary genders and, with man, accounts for the overwhelming majority of people alive. A woman is a person whose gender is woman: the category takes in cisgender women and trans women alike, because it is defined by the identity rather than by the route to it.

It appears in this reference for the same reason cisgender does. An index that catalogues only unusual genders implies that ordinary ones are not genders at all, which is the mistake the whole vertical exists to avoid.

Definition & scope

Woman is a gender term; female, used carefully, is a term about sex characteristics — chromosomes, gonads, hormones, anatomy. English blurs the two constantly, which is why so much argument about the word turns out on inspection to be argument about which of the two senses is in play. The same distinction is what makes intersex variation a fact about bodies rather than a gender identity.

Being a woman carries no implication about presentation. A woman may be conventionally feminine, butch, femme, a tomboy or otherwise gender nonconforming, and remains a woman throughout — expression and identity are separate axes, and the terms in the expression family are modifiers of this category rather than alternatives to it. Orientation is a third axis again, catalogued in the orientations vertical.

Girl is the same category at a younger age. The respellings womyn and womxn were coined to avoid the visible man inside the word; both remain minority usages, and the National LGBTQ+ Women's Community Survey found 89% of its 5,002 respondents preferring plain woman, against 3% choosing womyn and 1.6% womxn.

History & origins

• Old English: wīf means woman and mann means human being. The compound wīfmann, literally “woman-person”, is formed to name a female human specifically — a construction Etymonline notes is peculiar to English and Dutch.
• c. 1200: wīfmann has become wimman, and the spelling drifts to wu-; by the late thirteenth century it reaches wo-, while the plural keeps the older vowel, which is why woman and women are pronounced as they are.
• Middle English onward: wīf narrows to wife, and woman takes over the general sense from it and from the now-obsolete quean.
• Twentieth century: the sex/gender distinction is drawn explicitly, and woman is progressively used for the gender while female is reserved for the sex.
• 2021: the census of England and Wales becomes the first in the UK to ask about gender identity separately from sex, turning the distinction into an official statistic.

In practice

The category is the default for roughly half the world and, like man, is mostly encountered as an administrative fact rather than as a claim. Where it is contested it is contested at the edges — in sport, in single-sex services, in law — and those disputes concern the relationship between gender and recorded sex, not the meaning of the word in ordinary use.

Two practical asymmetries are worth recording. Women's gender is marked in ways men's is not — the existence of female doctor and the absence of male doctor is the standard illustration — and the vocabulary of feminine gender expression is far richer than its masculine counterpart, with butch, femme and tomboy all used chiefly of women against the single masculine-side coinage femboy.

Psychology

There is no diagnosis and no clinical literature on being a woman as such. The DSM-5 moved the diagnostic object from identity to distress when it replaced gender identity disorder with gender dysphoria, and the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter entirely in 2019.

The research that exists concerns femininity — the social expectations attached to the category — rather than the identity, and finds those expectations to vary enormously across cultures and periods while the identity itself does not.

Prevalence & culture

How common is being a woman?

Just under half of everyone, and the figure is more precisely known than any other in this vertical.

The World Bank's population series, built on UN estimates, puts the female share of the world population at 49.7% in 2024. The shortfall against the male share is the product of a sex ratio at birth of about 105 boys per 100 girls, only partly offset by women's longer life expectancy; in individual countries the balance tips the other way, and the global figure has moved by fractions of a point over decades.

That series counts recorded sex, not gender identity, and the distance between them is small. The 2021 census of England and Wales asked both for the first time and found that of the 45.7 million people aged 16 and over who answered the voluntary gender-identity question, 45.4 million — 93.5% — reported an identity matching the sex registered at birth, while 262,000 (0.5%) reported a different one, among them 48,000 trans women. Gallup's 2025 survey puts US transgender identification at 1.3% and the Williams Institute at 0.8% of adults, of whom roughly a third are trans women.

The census figures come with a published caveat. In September 2024 the Office for National Statistics reclassified them from accredited official statistics to official statistics in development, having found that some respondents — particularly those with lower English-language proficiency — may not have interpreted the question as intended. The overall population size is the part ONS still holds with high confidence; the breakdowns by specific identity are the part it does not.