Actor vs actress, when talking about a woman acting

I have no problem calling women "actors," I just often forget to do so because I've spent my whole life using the word "actress"

I work in theatre and in my experience, within the industry, I probably hear "actor" 95% of the time when referring to female-presenting performers. The only time I would personally use "actress" is if I were to talk about an award category.

All actresses are actors, but not all actors are actresses.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/s/xoep8JWCJ4 Similar question ^^

Probably so the women would not win a “man’s “ award in a category for character portrayal. Idk. 🤷‍♀️

It varies. The Guardian newspaper style guide explicitly says to use "actor" for everyone.

Actor is for both unless used for awards

As others have said, awards are a large reason for this. However "actor" is still gender neutral and can be used for women. I've noticed "waitress" is still somewhat commonly used and I have no idea why, but it's the same deal where "waiter" is gender neutral (and id say generally the "better" choice)

Actor isn't a gender neutral word (at least not etymologically). it is literally the Latin masculine form, with actrix (Anglicized into actress) as the feminine form. The same is true of all Latin-based words that had that -tor/-trix division. So how is using actor for everyone not just more akin to using fireman for both men and women? Is defaulting to the masculine form really removing gender, or just demonstrating a preference for defaulting to the masculine form?

I agree, it seems very dated to me. Of course, everybody is free to use language as they please, but personally I call all actors actors unless they state that they'd prefer to be referred to otherwise.

A big thing is that while english doesn't *generally* use grammatical gender, it used to. man and woman once upon a time were wereman and wifman, with "man" being the gender neutral term for us as a species. There are artifacts of this everywhere, crack open any fantasy book and "the realms of men, the kingdoms of men, the empire of man" is there because it sounds old and regal. "mankind" is a common term, and a massive amount of our profession names have man (policeman, mailman, fireman, seaman). And while women have always worked, (farmer is definitively not gendered) urban jobs like these have mostly excluded women until recently outside of a few (secretary and nurse are assumed to be a woman's thing unless stated otherwise) So when women started working more, a lot of jobs which were assumed to be men only got feminine versions. Actor was one of them as for a long time women were just not allowed on stage (in both ancient greece and shakespeare, which are the two biggest influences on theatre in the english speaking world did not have women. Any female characters were played by men in wigs) And also, it's going out of fashion. Voice acting for example (which are the people who voice animated stuff) are always voice actors, I can't think of a time I've heard "voice actress" but I might be wrong Hell all of this might be wrong, but it's my understanding of it

I have grown up with actor so I don't really mind. However, my mother would disagree. She's very equal rights feminist, but she grew up with women being actresses so to her, calling a woman an actor is disrespectful. She sees being an actress as something to be proud of and calling a woman an actor as a way of minimising their achievements and not recognising them. Like, why should women just have to be lumped in with men rather than being their own thing? Not necessarily the correct perspective, just a different perspective.

So most of the time removing gendered terms from professions, the gender doesn’t actually matter. It doesn’t matter if you are arrested by a policeman or a policewoman. It doesn’t matter if you are served by a waiter or a waitress, and so on. But with actors and actresses, the gender is fundamental to the job. You can’t swap the roles of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly without fundamentally breaking the movie. Gendered terms in acting are going to stay around for a long time, because gender in acting will still matter for a long time.

It's a sexist thing to remove the female term and leave only the male one.

In addition to what others have said, like awards, I wonder if another cause is that an actor's job is often very tied to their gender, in a way that fireperson isn't. An actress, usually, plays a woman, and a male actor usually a man. That said I tend to use actor for both. But I wonder if some women prefer actress, in a similar way that comedienne is used, where it is centering the female identity in using the word

I've found, outside of the Oscars, that people use "actor" as a genderless word noticeably more now than even 10 or 20 years ago.

Both work; but "Actress" in American English is the more Archaic Feminine use for Female Actor. Comes from when Male Workers had the "-or" Suffix and Female Workers had the "-ix" Suffix... Early to Middle English switch the Latin "-ix" Suffix for "-ess" Suffix.

Too much English words to think….so confusing 🫤

There are no gendered jobs in firefighting, but there are gendered roles in acting. There was a time maybe 30 or more years ago when there was talk about just calling actors actors and dropping the gendered classification, but it never stuck. It was the actresses, I think, who prefered to continue to be referred to as actress. This probably had to do more with the award shows though. I think there was fear that if they removed the gendered categories from the awards shows, like the Oscars, that it would be more difficult to females to be recognized.

I think it's because Actor is still viewed as gendered towards males. It's not like spokesperson and firefighter, which are both clearly ungendered. There has been movement towards making Actor the ungendered term, but for now that movement is slow, because instead of just adopting a new term, we're trying to change the meaning of an existing one.

There is definitely a movement towards using "actor" for all genders, for exactly the reasons you mention. I would guess it's not as common as the other usages you mentioned because "actor" doesn't feel as strongly gendered as "spokesman" etc bc it doesn't include "man".

One reason is because of award shows, such as the Oscars, where there are gendered categories.

I honestly think awards shows are still a big part of it In most careers, gender doesn't really matter that much, but you give different names to the Best Actor and Best Actress awards (Gendered awards are a debate all on their own, but they're not going away any time soon either)