Woman

A woman is an adult female human. Before adulthood, a female child or adolescent is referred to as a girl.

Typically, women are of the female sex and inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and women with functional uteruses are capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause. More generally, sex differentiation of the female fetus is governed by the lack of a present, or functioning, SRY gene on either one of the respective sex chromosomes. Female anatomy is distinguished from male anatomy by the female reproductive system, which includes the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, vagina, and vulva. An adult woman generally has a wider pelvis, broader hips, and larger breasts than an adult man. These characteristics facilitate childbirth and breastfeeding. Women typically have less facial and other body hair, have a higher body fat composition, and are on average shorter and less muscular than men.

Throughout human history, traditional gender roles within patriarchal societies have often defined and limited women's activities and opportunities, resulting in gender inequality; many religious doctrines and legal systems stipulate certain rules for women. With restrictions loosening during the 20th century in many societies, women have gained wider access to careers and the ability to pursue higher education. Violence against women, whether within families or in communities, has a long history and is primarily committed by men. Some women are denied reproductive rights and denied legal rights on the basis of sex. The movements and ideologies of feminism have a shared goal of achieving gender equality.

Some women are transgender, meaning they were assigned male at birth. Some women are intersex, meaning they have unusual sex characteristics (chromosomes, genitalia or internal sex organs). This includes women with Trisomy X, vaginal atresia, or other conditions.

The spelling of woman in English has progressed over the past millennium from wīfmann to wīmmann to wumman, and finally, the modern spelling woman. In Old English, mann had the gender-neutral meaning of 'human', akin to the Modern 'person' or 'someone'. The word for 'woman' was wīf or wīfmann (lit. 'woman-person') whereas 'man' was wer or wǣpnedmann (from wǣpn 'weapon; penis'). However, following the Norman Conquest, man began to mean 'male human', and by the late 13th century it had largely replaced wer. The consonants /f/ and /m/ in wīfmann coalesced into the modern woman, while wīf narrowed to specifically mean a married woman ('wife').

It is a popular misconception that the term "woman" is etymologically connected to "womb". "Womb" derives from the Old English word wamb meaning 'belly, uterus' (cognate to the modern German colloquial term "Wamme" from Old High German wamba for 'belly, paunch, lap').

The word woman can be used generally, to mean any female human, or specifically, to mean an adult female human as contrasted with girl. The word girl originally meant "young person of either sex" in English; it was only around the beginning of the 16th century that it came to mean specifically a female child. The term girl is sometimes used colloquially to refer to a young or unmarried woman; however, during the early 1970s, feminists challenged such use because the use of the word to refer to a fully grown woman may cause offense. In particular, previously common terms such as office girl are no longer widely used. Conversely, in certain cultures which link family honor with female virginity, the word girl (or its equivalent in other languages) is still used to refer to a never-married woman; in this sense it is used in a fashion roughly analogous to the more-or-less obsolete English maid or maiden.

The social sciences' views on what it means to be a woman have changed significantly since the early 20th century as women gained more rights and greater representation in the workforce, with scholarship in the 1970s moving toward a focus on the sex–gender distinction and social construction of gender. There are various words used to refer to the quality of being a woman. The term "womanhood" merely means the state of being a woman; "femininity" is used to refer to a set of typical female qualities associated with a certain attitude to gender roles; "womanliness" is like "femininity", but is usually associated with a different view of gender roles.^{[citation needed]}