gender and sex. Efforts have been made in recent years to enforce a distinction between gender and sex, using gender to refer to femaleness or maleness in cultural, social, and linguistic contexts and sex in biological ones. This distinction is far from being universally applied or accepted, and it is still perfectly in order to speak of ‘sex roles’ or ‘sexual stereotypes’. Gender should, however, be used where there is a risk of sex being misunderstood to mean ‘sexual activity’ rather than maleness or femaleness. Gender is the correct term to use in language contexts when classifying nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter