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Generally speaking, the notion of "gender", more precisely of "grammatical gender", is used to classify nouns into groups. As an instance, in Italian language there are two categories labeled "masculine" and "feminine", with only some instances of vestigial neuter. As far as I know this classification has little to do with male and female: a cloud is masculine in French (le nuage) and feminine in Italian (la nuvola). It is well known that in English there are no such classes of nouns.

English grammar makes us conscious of "gender" in the third person singular pronouns; but here it is a matter of "natural" not "grammatical gender", since the pronouns are applied according to the sex of the person being referred to.

Words such as artist, athlete, cat, clerk, doctor, giraffe, patient, student, teacher, they, writer are common in natural gender and so they could denote either male or female.

I'm looking for an appropriate word to describe these words. Obviously this word cannot be "neuter", since "neuter" is already associated to the concept of "grammatical gender".

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What I meant was, Why is "gender-neutral" not appropriate for words like artist, athlete, cat, clerk, doctor, giraffe, patient, student, teacher, they, writer? It seems ideally suited to me. – Andrew Leach Jul 23 '12 at 20:43
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@Carlo_R., I'm not confusing anything. I think you should familiarise yourself with how gender is understood in linguistics. Gender is usually understood as a kind or type (genus), not biological sex in linguistic research. – Alex B. Jul 23 '12 at 21:44
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@Carlo_R., if you're interested in gender in different languages, then feel free to ask/browse Linguistics SE - I'm there too. In typological research, the term "epicene" might be somewhat more common. However, this is ELU. – Alex B. Jul 23 '12 at 21:50
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@Carlo_R. Sounds like you’re the one who’s confused about gender here. – tchrist Jul 23 '12 at 21:59
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Sorry to contradict you, Carlo, but in Italian the term you chose, "poeta", is not a feminine noun. According to Zingarelli Dictionary, poeta is a masculin noun which very rarely can be used for a woman (normal term would be poetessa). According to your reasoning, then "mano" would be a masculine term, which is not the case as you know. I do not fully understand what you are aiming at with your question, but the example you quoted is not clarifying. And I support @tchrist's comment that Italian doesn't have neutral nouns. – Paola Jul 23 '12 at 22:54
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The term "gender-neutral", as indicated by your tag, is commonly used to describe such words. In grammatical terminology, such words are described as belonging to the "common gender", though this term is somewhat antiquated since, as you mentioned, English does not have grammatical gender.

Other possible terms are "gender-inclusive" and "epicene".

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epicene: having characteristic of both sexes or no characteristic of either sex; of indeterminate sex. Great, great, great; accepted. – Carlo_R. Jul 23 '12 at 20:50

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