Notably, language as it is spoken and understood is not so clearly divided. Jobs done by men sometimes got the -man suffix; I can't recall a single female-dominant job that ends in -man. The use of the -man suffix just reinforces that, and there's no way to escape the fact some part of your audience will here that. That is linguistically embedded in usage of -man forms.

@prosfilaes women as a strong part of the workforce is a development that is less than 100 years old (in most parts of the world). There are no jobs that are traditionally female-dominant, because there is no traditional dominance for women in the workforce (dating back over a century). It's similar to the "every purple elephant can fly" fallacy.

@Ertai87 That's ridiculous. Women have been working as long as there have been people. "In the Victorian era domestic service was the second largest category of employment in England and Wales, after agricultural work." (Maid, Wikipedia) Speaking of which, women have been involved in agricultural work as long as humans have been doing agricultural work. The Wikipedia article Women in the workforce has much detail about 19th century women laborers. This comes from defining women's work as not work and ignoring women in the workforce.

@Ertai87 I don't think the idea of "the workforce" is much older than that anyway.

@Ertai87 And in any case, many jobs are traditionally female-dominant (at least in the US), namely nurses and teachers come to mind easily.

It should also be noted that -man is pronounced "mun" and -men is pronounced "min". These are two suffixes that are spelled the same and have common roots with man/men, but they are distinct morphemes, and haven't undergone the same gendering.

@prosfilaes "I can't recall a single female-dominant job that ends in -man." Charwoman.

@Ertai87 There was a window during the Industrial Revolution when the market for male wage labor exploded first, but it was soon followed by child and female labor. Before that, female-dominant occupations such as weaving were common. Wage labor isn't the only type of work.

@Ertai87 "There are no jobs that are traditionally female-dominant, because there is no traditional dominance for women in the workforce (dating back over a century)." This is absurdly false and really needs fact checking on your side (I'm assuming you are not being intentionally sexist, giving you the benefit of the doubt). There are lots of payed-for activities (what I generally I view as a job without tying the term to specific legislation) where woman were and are dominant.

@prosfilaes I actually just thought of an example of a female-dominant occupation with a female ending: "seamstress" (ending in "-ess"). The male (actually gender-neutral) equivalent would be "tailor", which is a completely different word with a minor difference in connotation (in my mind tailors tend to work primarily on higher-end clothes like suits, while seamstresses work on basically anything clothing-related, including suits but also including daily clothes); there is no male equivalent to a "seamstress". It doesn't end in "-man" (or "-woman"), but there is an example.

In Old English the suffix “-ster” was a specifically female occupational suffix. The only modern remnant of this use that I can think of is “spinster”. (Originally, a woman who spins (thread).) Update: The OED says it is the only surviving example: “spinster… alone of the group has survived (though with change of sense) solely as a feminine”.

@Acccumulation If you weren't joking, that is a disingenuous suggestion, since it does not end with ‘man’ but with ‘woman’. OED analyzes this as follows: “a few words of which [‘man’] is the second element [including ‘woman’] are no longer felt to be compounds owing to obscuration of the first element…”

@Ertai87 Note that Old English had in addition to the feminine form _ sémestre_, a masculine form seámere.

@MarkDominus Interesting, I always thought "-ster" was a male suffix, or at least gender-neutral, with the exception of "spinster".

It is now, since the 16th century. (Consider “trickster”.) Old English was a thousand years ago!

@MarkDominus The suffix "man" in "woman" has the same root as the one in "chairman".

@prosfilaes "charwoman" is constructed from "char" and "woman", and "woman" is constructed from "wo" and "man", and "woman" is a surviving artifact from when "man" was not gendered.

@Acccumulation Woman is not constructed from wo and man. Its ancestor in Old English was, but the modern English word is inherited from the Middle English.