What is the unisex form of a word like fisherman? Do you have to use fisherman and fisherwoman separately, or is fisherperson acceptable? I couldn’t find a dictionary with the word …
In general, what do you do when a word does not have a unisex form?
There really is no general rule. Language evolves, and the evolution is primarily influenced by the people using the word, and different communities have different ways of thinking, so the “unisex” solutions turn out to be different for different words.
There is a critical distinction to be drawn here between at least three kinds of gender-neutral language.
One is grammatical neutrality: this is easy in English but hard in many languages. For example, moon has no grammatical gender in English, but is feminine in French (la lune) and masculine in German (der Mond). Nevertheless, a few words in English sometimes take particular gender pronouns: earth, moon, and nature, for example, certain moral qualities (such as wisdom and justice), and certain forms of transportation (such as ships and automobiles), are sometimes feminine and take the pronoun she. You might describe this as personification. Another term for it, according to the Wikipedia article “Gender in English”, is covert gender.
A second kind is etymological neutrality: language that contains no possible ambiguity, because it avoids root words that could be mistaken to mean only people who identify as a particular gender. In English, we rely more and more on such terms: attendant, parenthood, letter carrier, not stewardess, motherhood, fatherhood, postman.
A third kind is connotative neutrality: language having grammatical or etymological roots in a gender, but nevertheless used and understood to connote nothing about gender: manslaughter, freshman class, maiden voyage, master key, fraternal twins, lumberjack, matriculate.
In the fishing industry, the gender-neutral term actually used most is fisherman, plural fishermen. The term is neutral in the first and third sense, but not the second. It is grammatically neutral, neutral in connotation, but not neutral in etymology, much like freshman and lumberjack.
There was a campaign in Canada to adopt the word fisher, but the women in the profession largely refused to have anything to do with it:
[F]ederal efforts to replace fisherman with fisher in government documents, coupled with a high-profile Supreme Court decision on native fishing rights, caused a riptide of dissent over what to call people who fish. To complicate matters, many women in the industry didn’t want their job title changed and insisted on being called fishermen.¹
It is certainly possible that the preference for fisherman as the gender-neutral term will diminish as time passes. Over the past thirty years, the use of many such words has become less common. As of this writing, fisher has not yet caught on in occupational or popular usage. Some academics and governmental agencies now use the term fisher, and this may eventually influence the public. See for example the conclusion of the recent Australian Broadcasting Corporation article, “Is ‘fishermen’ a sexist and exclusionary term?” But only time will tell whether fisher really will catch on.
I have worked in the high seas commercial fishing industry my entire life. All the women I have met who fish for a living will admonish and correct you for calling them "fisherwoman". We work hard for our title and that is Fisherman.
Man has always been used in a gender-neutral way per Merriam-Webster. Until the arguably over-sensitive demands of feminism since the 1960s, words like fisherman or chairman were readily accepted as non-specific as to gender. As a result, the natural plural was the usual men. Continued use is therefore a matter of bravery!
I think the use of the word "Angler" would be appropriate.
an•gler (ˈæŋ glər)
n. 1. a person who fishes with a hook and line
Once you've adopted a term and have used it commonly for most of your life, it becomes normal, no matter how inappropriate or flawed it may be. Because you know and live it so commonly you don't really have to think about it... It just is...
So when you change it all of a sudden you have to think about it every time. You reference it and everything about whenever it's spoken or used in a document becomes thinking that wasn't needed before. That's very stressful and that's why people resist learning new ways of doing old things they've done all their lives. It causes stress. And who wants to stress out about something they never had to before?
It's better to leave it as is for the people accustomed to it and make the changes apply to new staff. The next generation of fishing professionals that now only know it the way that's correct.
I can't believe nobody's given this answer, so I guess I will. I'd just simply say "fisher."
I don't think there’s a single definitive solution.
Most commonly, the suffix -men is used for the plural. The somewhat ungainly phrase “[term]men and women” (e.g., “fishermen and women”) can be used to make the inclusivity explicit.
