Female

word for 'female' The word female comes from the Latin , the diminutive form of , meaning "woman", by way of the Old French femelle. It is not etymologically related to the word male, but in the late 14th century the English spelling was altered to parallel that of male. It has been used as both noun and adjective since the 14th century. A century later, the meaning was expanded to include non-human female organisms. the linguistic fashion had changed, and female was often considered disparaging, usually on the grounds that it grouped humans with other animals. In the 21st century, the noun female is primarily used to describe non-human animals, to refer to biologically female humans in an impersonal technical context (e.g., "Females were more likely than males to develop an autoimmune disease"), or to impartially include a range of people without reference to age (e.g., girls) or social status (e.g., lady). Biological sex is conceptually distinct from gender, although they are often used interchangeably. The adjective female can describe a person's sex or gender identity. ==Defining characteristics==

Females produce ova, the usually larger gametes in a heterogamous reproduction system, while the smaller and usually motile gametes, the spermatozoa, are produced by males. Generally, a female cannot reproduce sexually without access to the gametes of a male, and vice versa, but in some species females can reproduce by themselves asexually, for example via parthenogenesis. Patterns of sexual reproduction include: • Isogamous species with two or more mating types with gametes of identical form and behavior (but different at the molecular level), • Anisogamous species with gametes of male and female types, • Oogamous species, which include humans, in which the female gamete is much larger than the male and has no ability to move. Oogamy is a form of anisogamy. There is an argument that this pattern was driven by the physical constraints on the mechanisms by which two gametes get together as required for sexual reproduction. Other than the defining difference in the type of gamete produced, differences between males and females in one lineage cannot always be predicted by differences in another. The concept is not limited to animals; egg cells are produced by chytrids, diatoms, water moulds and land plants, among others. In land plants, female and male designate not only the egg- and sperm-producing organisms and structures, but also the structures of the sporophytes that give rise to male and female plants. == Females across species ==

Species that are divided into females and males are classified as gonochoric in animals, as dioecious in seed plants and as dioicous in cryptogams. In some species, female and hermaphrodite individuals may coexist, a sexual system termed gynodioecy. In a few species, female individuals coexist with males and hermaphrodites; this sexual system is called trioecy. In Thor manningi (a species of shrimp), females coexist with males and protandrous hermaphrodites. Mammalian female for comparison. (Both models have partially shaved body hair to show anatomy, i.e., clean-shaven pubic regions.) A distinguishing characteristic of the class Mammalia is the presence of mammary glands. Mammary glands are modified sweat glands that produce milk, which is used to feed the young for some time after birth. Only mammals produce milk. Mammary glands are obvious in humans, because the female human body stores large amounts of fatty tissue near the nipples, resulting in prominent breasts. Mammary glands are present in all mammals, although they are normally redundant in males of the species. Most mammalian females have two copies of the X chromosome, while males have only one X and one smaller Y chromosome; some mammals, such as the platypus, have different combinations. One of the female's X chromosomes is randomly inactivated in each cell of placental mammals while the paternally derived X is inactivated in marsupials. In birds and some reptiles, by contrast, it is the female which is heterozygous and carries a Z and a W chromosome while the male carries two Z chromosomes. In mammals, females can have XXX or X. Mammalian females bear live young, with the exception of monotreme females, which lay eggs. Some non-mammalian species, such as guppies, have analogous reproductive structures; and some other non-mammals, such as some sharks, also bear live young. Following experiments by French endocrinologist Alfred Jost in the 1940s, it is widely believed that the female is the default sex in mammalian sexual determination. However, this idea was called into question by a 2017 study. ==Sex determination==

The sex of a particular organism may be determined by genetic or environmental factors, or may naturally change during the course of an organism's life. In many arthropods, sex is determined by infection with parasitic, endosymbiotic bacteria of the genus Wolbachia. The bacterium can only be transmitted via infected ova, and the presence of the obligate endoparasite may be required for female sexual viability. == Evolution ==

The question of how females evolved is mainly a question of why males evolved. The first organisms reproduced asexually, usually via binary fission, wherein a cell splits itself in half. From a strict numbers perspective, a species that is half males/half females can produce half the offspring an asexual population can, because only the females are having offspring. Being male can also carry significant costs, such as in flashy sexual displays in animals (such as big antlers or colorful feathers), or needing to produce an outsized amount of pollen as a plant in order to get a chance to fertilize a female. Yet despite the costs of being male, there must be some advantage to the process. Before the evolution of anisogamy, mating types in a species were isogamous: the same size and both could move, catalogued only as "+" or "-" types. In anisogamy, the mating cells are called gametes. The female gamete is larger than the male gamete, and usually immotile. Anisogamy remains poorly understood, as there is no fossil record of its emergence. Numerous theories exist as to why anisogamy emerged. Many share a common thread, in that larger female gametes are more likely to survive, and that smaller male gametes are more likely to find other gametes because they can travel faster. Current models often fail to account for why isogamy remains in a few species. Anisogamy appears to have evolved multiple times from isogamy; for example female Volvocales (a type of green algae) evolved from the plus mating type. Female sex organs (genitalia, in animals) have an extreme range of variation among species and even within species. The evolution of female genitalia remains poorly understood compared to male genitalia, reflecting a now-outdated belief that female genitalia are less varied than male genitalia, and thus less useful to study. The difficulty of reaching female genitalia has also complicated their study. New 3D technology has made female genital study simpler. Genitalia evolve very quickly. There are three main hypotheses as to what impacts female genital evolution: lock-and-key (genitals must fit together), cryptic female choice (females affect whether males can fertilize them), and sexual conflict (a sort of sexual arms race). There is also a hypothesis that female genital evolution is the result of pleiotropy, i.e. unrelated genes that are affected by environmental conditions like low food also affect genitals. This hypothesis is unlikely to apply to a significant number of species, but natural selection in general has some role in female genital evolution. ==Symbol==

The symbol ♀ (Unicode: U+2640 Alt codes: Alt+12), a circle with a small cross underneath, is commonly used to represent females. Joseph Justus Scaliger once speculated that the symbol was associated with Venus, goddess of beauty, because it resembles a bronze mirror with a handle, but modern scholars consider that fanciful, and the most established view is that the female and male symbols derive from contractions in Greek script of the Greek names of the planets Thouros (Mars) and Phosphoros (Venus). ==See also==