>I decided to just ask 4 women colleagues and they all agreed unanimously that referring to women as female is weird. It's clinical I actually already agree w

>I decided to just ask 4 women colleagues and they all agreed unanimously that referring to women as female is weird. It's clinical I actually already agree with your coworkers reactions but your survey isn't really what I was doing. In regular conversation, I don't call women "females" and don't know anybody who does. Yes, that would be clinical sounding and de-humanizing. But in writing, when we wanted the text to refer to both F-gender-age-over-18=="women" plus F-gender-age-under-18=="girls" ... the elegant short phrase that covered both was "females". It's just a form of text compression. And (some) women journalists still using "females" in 2022 means people are still using it innocuously. It's a shame that incels ruined it.