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The term 'sausage fest' is quite often used when you talk about a group of which most (or all) members are male.

What would be the term for a female dominated group of people?

I have looked online, but most answer seem quite silly. Even though sausage fest isn't a very professional term either, it does seem more likely to be used in a casual conversation then clam jam or taco party.

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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
    – tchrist ♦
    Jun 17, 2020 at 13:18

7 Answers 7

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If you’re familiar with the etymology of sausage fest and one of the meanings of melon, it should be obvious why there is some currency to “melon fest”:

at the only security con in the world with lines for the ladies room & a 'melon fest' on the dancefloor! — Twitter

I'm at a carrots birthday party and UAN is blarring I only came bc I thought there was gonna be hot guys its a melon fest — Twitter

Twitter is far from a sausage fest! To be honest its a bit of a melon fest ;) — Twitter

And a reversal of sorts:

You gotta love anything called a 'melon fest'! No, not at a plastic surgery convention... I'm in Chinchilla QLD with actual melons. funny — Twitter

This term matches the original “sausage fest” in a lot of important ways:

  • It’s about as raunchy a term. Don’t use this in polite company!
  • It can be used when the group also includes men. The only requirement is that most of the group are women, or even just more are women than the speaker thinks there should be.
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    Hm; I've never heard this phrase (NE USA).
    – Jason C
    Jun 16, 2020 at 23:09
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    I feel like Melon and sausage are the most obvious two foods to which gender is associated. So that why i prefer this answer more the clam fest
    – SirDuckduck
    Jun 18, 2020 at 11:00
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    Never heard this term in the UK or Texas, and I don't associate melons with women at all: clams very much so. But I suspect this is just regional: would be great to see a regional map of where each of these terms is more popular! :D
    – Dewi Morgan
    Jun 18, 2020 at 17:51
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Clam fest (qv https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Clamfest) would be the most direct conceptual equivalent here, so would make sense even to those only familiar with the former term.

Examples found online:

their half of the island was a sausage party, while my half of the island was a complete clam fest,

Are most of this shows fans female?

28 y/o male here, and it seems Like it's a total clam fest, this fandom.

If I had known the [RPG] party would be a total clam fest I would have played a guy.

Not sure what sort of board gaming places you're going to, but my board game nights are a total clam-fest. At the very least we're a 50/50 split

We jokingly said she'd have to play a guy because our party was becoming a real clam-fest (we're up to 6 girls 1 guy).

My god the local game story is such a clam fest, as soon as guy walks in he gets swarmed by loud obnoxious gamer chicks.

Based on the quotes I found, however, this seems like it might be nerd-slang, used in gamer circles more than anything else. I only found one use not related to gaming:

Las Vegas Pool Party Girls: thats like a total clam fest ..that's what'im talking about

... and even that could have been posted by a gamer.

Unfortunately, we don't get much from checking the Google ngrams for "melon fest" (none found), "clam fest" (none found), "sausage fest" (started being used in late 90s), and "clam bake" (overwhelmingly popular for about 200 years, but impossible to tell whether any of these uses were referring to anything other than food).

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sausage+fest%2C+clam+fest%2C+clam+bake%2C+melon+fest&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csausage%20fest%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cclam%20bake%3B%2Cc0

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    I have also heard the variation "clam bake", with the same meaning.
    – Meg
    Jun 17, 2020 at 14:36
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    To the extent that slang represents terminology employed by members of a certain demographic or social group, all slang is nerd-slang to an extent, for nerds of the relevant persuasion. But 'clambake', at least, definitely isn't exclusively gamer-slang. ("clam fest" might be. It has a telltale lack of creativity and wit.) Here's a 2012 cite, Cracked's Michael Swaim on "5 Reasons Women Will Rule the Future": "WHY will the future be a clambake, and not the present sausagefest?"
    – FeRD
    Jun 17, 2020 at 17:07
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    I've heard Clam Jam too
    – Neil McGuigan
    Jun 19, 2020 at 16:11
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Taco fest and clambake are the only two I found with their own Wiktionary pages, with "taco fest" being the only one linked from sausagefest and the best-cited, for example:

I heard she stopped going because Xday is such a taco fest. All the guys that are there are getting old.

Urban Dictionary agrees:

taco fest

The female equivalent to a sausage fest. Can be any place inundated with females, where few or no men exist; basically a girls' club.

"Dude, that Catholic girls' school is a total taco fest."

"Kinda like the *N SYNC concert."

and:

clambake

The female corollary to the term sausagefest; a bar or club where the crowd is surprisingly almost exclusively female, especially when you are looking to meet men.

I heard this club brought out the hot shoegazer boys, but it's a real clambake in here.

Urban Dictionary also has entries for taco party and clamfest, a less-popular entry for melon fest, and an entry for clam jam, though it's primarily listed as being the female equivalent of cock block. There's also fish market, which is about as popular as clamfest, but seems more vulgar.

However, "sausage fest" is common enough that I couldn't imagine someone unironically calling an event that, but there are actual taco fests like Taco Fest Montreal and "clambake" also refers to literally baking clams (popular in New England).

As well I looked up some other suggestions on Google Trends in the USA and found out there's a Melon Fest in Michigan, Clam Fest in Maine, and an annual Clam Jam party in Connecticut. Meanwhile "babe fest" didn't have enough data.

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  • No, 'fish market' is not the same. Fish market is like a night club with women there that you wouldn't to meet, it doesn't imply anything about there being more women than men at the club, it's just that there a lot of women there are probably looking to 'hook up', but there might be almost as many men as women at the club. Urban dictionary is wrong when it says that its the female equivalent of sausage fest.
    – Hollis Williams
    Jun 17, 2020 at 20:45
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    @Tom It's slang. How can slang be wrong?
    – wjandrea
    Jun 17, 2020 at 22:13
  • I'd only heard "clambake" in the sense of the Scientology-expose group, but it makes a lot of sense in this context too. I wonder if it's regional like soda/pop. I can see it being a popular term for this especially in places where actual clam bakes are a real-life thing (I'm picturing New England, probably because I associate it with clam chowder). Where'd you hear it?
    – Dewi Morgan
    Jun 18, 2020 at 17:48
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    @Dewi I'm not sure if I've ever heard it myself. I think I found it by googling wiktionary taco party and it was linked on the page for taco fest. But according to Jason C's answer, they use it in PA/NY, near New England.
    – wjandrea
    Jun 18, 2020 at 19:22
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I have heard this...

hen party NOUN
A social gathering of women, especially a hen night.
Lexico

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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
    – tchrist ♦
    Jun 17, 2020 at 13:20
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    While a hen party is indeed an all-female gathering, in British English that term means something more specific: a party in honour of a bride-to-be, organised and attended by her female friends. The equivalent term in American English is bachelorette party. (This is a summary of what appeared in the removed comments, for the benefit of future visitors to this page.)
    – jsw29
    Jun 25, 2020 at 16:52
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Where I'm from (PA/NY, USA), we call that a clam bake (especially if it's a hot summer day).

It is a pun of the cooking method with the same name (and on the West Coast I believe the term also refers to the actual event), and evidence of slang usage parallel to "sausage fest" exists in Urban Dictionary.

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One term that is used very, very often is not very exciting and has no sexual connotations. It's simply girls' night or girls' night out. Thesaurus.com cites it, as does Urban Dictionary.

The tone of Urban Dictionary's definition is derisive: "A planned event, usually held at a cheesy Irish pub or dance club, where groups of females dress provocatively, flirt insessantly [sic], dance badly, and accept free drinks from desparate [sic] single men. The event usually ends when one female passes out in her own vomit or when one of their boyfriends shows up."

While the term can be used in this way, it is also used very frequently by women of all ages to describe an evening when they simply go out to dinner or have drinks with a group of female friends. Collins defines girls' night out as "an evening spent outside of the home by a group of women". Based on my experience as a native English speaker living in New England, I can confirm that it is an expression very commonly used to describe rather mundane activities. I hear British English speakers use it as well (and Collins corroborates that).

Girls' night out doesn't generally have the raunchy flavor of sausage fest, but it does answer the question in the body of the OP's text: "What would be the term for a female dominated group of people?"

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  • 13
    No, "girl's night (out)" is the female equivalent of "guy's night (out)", that is, an event specifically planned to have only/primarily guys. On the other hand, a "sausage fest" incidentally has primarily guys, for example, "the comp sci department is a total sausage fest". Though to your credit, OP didn't give an example sentence, and I've heard of guys specifically planning their own "sausage fest" events.
    – wjandrea
    Jun 16, 2020 at 21:37
  • Well, I made it clear anyway that I didn't think it was the equivalent of sausage fest, which it certainly is not.
    – Isabel Archer
    Jun 16, 2020 at 21:44
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    The question was what is the female equivalent for "sausage fest", so if you don't think that "girls' night out" matches that criteria then why answer with it?
    – Kevin
    Jun 16, 2020 at 21:46
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    You make a good point, and I thought about that before answering. There are two questions in the post. One is in the title (reference to sausage fest), and one is in the body of the post, and I quote it at the end of the answer: "What would be the term for a female dominated group of people?" My answer applies mostly to the second question. If I've committed a breach of protocol, I'll happily remove it.
    – Isabel Archer
    Jun 16, 2020 at 21:51
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    I'd suggest a note at the top of your answer pointing out that you're not answering the title question, just a different interpretation of part of the question body. It's maybe useful to have an answer explaining the meaning of "girl's night out" and how it's different from terms in other answers like "clam fest".
    – Peter Cordes
    Jun 17, 2020 at 14:51
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As a collective noun, in tune with your example, the term, 'Babe Fest' is quite often used when you talk about a group of which most (or all) members are female. Although this implies most are attractive looking.

It is slightly more tasteful than your examples of, 'Clam Jam' and 'Taco Party', but I guess will be dependent on your intended audience?

Might be worth changing your question heading from, 'What is the opposite of a sausage fest', to 'What is the female equivalent of a Sausage Fest?'

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    Please give an authoritative reference, linked and attributed, if possible. Otherwise, supporting data (eg over 10 000 hits for "Babe Fest", and/or a couple of examples of use by a respected author (though I doubt Shakespeare used the term), on a Google search, would vastly improve this answer.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Jun 16, 2020 at 11:04
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    'Clam Jam' and 'Taco Party' have suggestions of clamydia and tackiness.
    – Weather Vane
    Jun 16, 2020 at 13:24
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    @Weather *chlamydia. And no, they don't. Are you just going off their sounds or is that an actual association/insinuation people have made?
    – wjandrea
    Jun 16, 2020 at 17:32
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    From their sounds. Those names, the sound of the names, suggests some kind of unsavoury situation.
    – Weather Vane
    Jun 16, 2020 at 17:34
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    @WeatherVane that actually makes them more equivalent, since "sausage fest" also has such connotations.
    – barbecue
    Jun 16, 2020 at 18:53

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