Is there a gender neutral phrase or expression to replace "old woman"?

Question

There are people who behave like the stereotypical old woman who frets over the smallest concern and is constantly cautioning others about physical dangers. Such people can be either sex and barely middle-aged.

They always click on buy travel insurance when booking an airticket, they regard a ladder as akin to a 5.14 climb. They are obsessed with germs. They are uncomfortable beyond the confines of a 4- star hotel. They set up absurd procedures "in case anything happens" (I don't mean writing a will). They cancel their indoor tennis game if there is one inch of snow on the ground. The males make an enormous deal out of a broken leg.

Maybe they are mainly women, and maybe they are middle-aged or older, but is there another term (phrase, expression or word), one that is gender neutral?

They can be very nice people, but they are dismissable as "old women". Even I do it in my mind (never out loud) and I don't like that in myself.

There are/have been many great old women — Jane Goodall, for example, and Golda Meir and many others — and there will be more as people retain physical and mental strength deeper into old age. But there will still be a phrase needed for the "timid, over-cautious, dithery, person whose overriding goal is safety. I'd like a gentle term that could be used with humor but that will rachet down the twittering and fluttering whenever a competent person starts to do something that makes them nervous.

Answer 1

If you want to characterize their fears as excessively focused on unlikely issues, you could call them a worrywart:

: a person who worries too much or who worries about things that are not important _m-w.com

Answer 2

My generation tends to call this type of person an old fogey (instead of old man or old woman), plural old fogeys.

I can't do better than Word-Detective.com, so here's a post from that site that explains perfectly:

"Fogey," of course, is, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it so well, "a disrespectful appellation for a man advanced in life, especially one with antiquated notions; an old-fashioned fellow." The word (also spelled "fogy," by the way) is probably Scottish in origin, but its ultimate roots are a bit uncertain. It's possible that "fogey" is based on an antiquated sense of "foggy," which meant "moss-covered," but my favorite theory traces it to the Scottish word "foggie," meaning a kind of brown bumblebee.

"Fogey" is almost always preceded by the slightly redundant "old," but there are, indeed, "young fogeys." The term is most often used to refer to a group of young but conservative writers and novelists in England who came to prominence in the early 1980s. The novelist and critic A.N. Wilson is probably the "young fogey" most widely known to Americans.

Maybe it's my own age showing, but the term "fogey" doesn't seem quite as pejorative to me as it used to -- my sense is that it is getting harder to pin down exactly where good taste leaves off and "fogeyness" begins. I would like to think that one doesn't have to be an "old fogey" or even a "young fogey" to object to "tabloid TV," "shock radio" and the popular fascination with "supermodels" which seem to have supplanted what was left of American culture, but I may be wrong. Maybe I'm a some sort of fogey after all. There are worse fates.

http://www.word-detective.com/back-b.html

Answer 3

It depends how much you are wanting to point and make fun.

Over-anxious perhaps?

The over-anxious always click on "buy travel insurance" when booking a ticket.

Answer 4

You could refer to these apprehensive persons as nervous Nellies (or the singular nervous Nelly), Merriam-Webster defines the term

plural nervous Nellies

a timid or worrisome person
— many new parents are nervous Nellies when it comes to the health of their babies

Answer 5

finicky is kinder and gentler, I think.

excessively particular or fastidious; difficult to please; fussy.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/finicky?s=t