For decades, the restaurant industry relied on gender-marked titles: waiter for men and waitress for women. Today, that distinction has largely collapsed. While many modern establishments have defaulted to the term server to avoid gender bias, we’ve inadvertently created a linguistic puzzle. Does “waiter” still imply a man, or has it returned to its original status as a neutral, professional title? Understanding the shift from waiter vs server isn’t just about “political correctness”—it’s about how language naturally sheds redundant markers to reflect a changing workplace.
Why Don’t We Say Waitress Anymore?
First of all, for the whys and wherefores. Waitress has gone the way of many gender biased terms in English that are seen as sexist. There have always been many biased terms in English, and not only sexist ones; racist ones as well. English didn’t invent the practice. Of course, it’s used in many other languages.
Marked and Unmarked Terms
To understand all this, we need a little lesson in linguistics. Linguists refer to words as being marked or unmarked. Unmarked words are the normal or base versions of words. Waiter is such a word. So is steward and host.
Just as we used to call female waiters “waitresses,” we also used to say actress and hostess. It seems harmless to many people. After all, a waiter is a male server. A female wouldn’t want to be called a male, would she? Well, there is more to it than that.
Waiter is a Neutral Unmarked Term
Sure, when we say waiter, we are thinking of him, not her. But those types of terms are also part of a larger group of unmarked terms that are neutral, and as I said before, normal.
This is very important to our understanding. Putting the -ress on the end “marks” the basic version, so as to set it apart from the “normal” version. What we are saying is that these are activities that are normally done by a man, and marked forms generally designate female activities.
🐕 Did you know? The doggie bag used to be more than just a nickname for restaurant leftovers. But was it ever really for the family dog?
Read More: The Real History of the Doggie Bag
Waiter was Never Gender-Specific
In reality, although we think of it this way, the root form was never meant to be gender-specific; we just made it that way by creating a marked version. Today, since we largely reject such gender distinction, we have started to abolish such language and we prefer gender-neutral terms for occupations.
So females who act are called actors, not actresses, and we don’t say comedienne; we say comedian or comic. In both these cases, the normal unmarked form came to be used.
In other instances, this wouldn’t work. For instance, barman and barmaid became bartender. This makes sense. And, apologies to Angie Dickinson, but if her show were on today, it would have to have a different name, unless you think “Police Officer” would make a good name for a TV show. Again, we couldn’t have started calling female police officers “policemen.”
Firefighter replaced fireman as women began to enter that service, and again, this makes sense. But when there does exist a perfectly good base or gender-neutral form, why don’t we use it? It is because of the reason I stated above. We often do not understand that these forms are gender-neutral. Well-meaning people or organizations, often governments, invent or substitute new terms.
Steward vs. Stewardess: Creating Gender-Neutral Terms
The steward versus stewardess fiasco does make a bit of sense. Airlines used to exclusively reserve the job for women. Not only that, but they didn’t try to hide the fact that they were looking for young and attractive women. Even the advertisements made this clear.
In the 1971 case Diaz versus Pan American World Airways, the Supreme Court ruled that the airline’s refusal to hire men was illegal, and thereafter, more and more men began to be hired.
Women flight attendants, who had heretofore been referred to as stewardesses, would probably have been a bit shocked to suddenly be called stewards, since there had never been any men and the term had never been used, although it existed from ocean-going ships and was indeed a perfectly acceptable neutral form.
The profession could have probably adapted to the title. However, the neutral-seeming term “flight attendant” was invented, and the word stewardess has since all but disappeared.
What we can see is that there has been a desire to create gender-neutral terms even when there was no need to create them. The base forms were already gender-neutral, and only had the connotation of “maleness” because they were given that by our male-centric society or by the profession traditionally being a male one.
Artisanal Food? Uh-huh. That and a quarter will get you a (fill in the blank). Learn why this term for “made by hand in small batches” is about as useful as the word “unironically.”
Read More: What is Artisanal Food?
What About Waitron or Waitperson?
Fortunately, the ridiculous attempt at a gender-neutral term for waiter, waitron wasn’t heard much past the 1980s and died out, although it is still seen in books used by authors who are perhaps too concerned with offending a reader or two.
It has been suggested that waitron actually began as a pejorative term and that the -on suffix was borrowed from automaton to suggest that waiting tables was a mindless, repetitive, and almost robotic activity.
Nothing could be further from the truth, so it is just as well that this ridiculous attempt did not catch on. It was never widely used, except perhaps among restaurant kitchen staff of a nasty disposition.
Waitperson, like waitron, is of the 1970s to ’80s vintage, and was never widely adopted. It is cumbersome, and I can’t imagine anyone using it in casual conversation.
Server vs Waiter: Which to Use?
But what you may be wondering is which, between waiter and server, is OK. In reality, either is perfectly fine because both can be used as a gender-neutral form. They are linguistically neutral, as I have stated.
Waiter, because of the association of the job historically with males, hasn’t been seen as gender-neutral, but we are well past such concerns today. A Twitter conversation reminded me also of the word cashier.
We have never attempted a female-marked word for cashier, and we have no trouble thinking of a cashier as a male or a female, simply because the job has never been distinctly associated with either sex (clerk may be a different story). Waiter, if history had been different, could have evolved culturally to be gender-neutral just as the word cashier did.
The word server was widely adopted in restaurants, for the reasons stated above, perhaps out of confusion, or perhaps because people couldn’t shake the association of waiter with male. It seems that many people actually thought that the words waiter and waitress were deemed insulting or demeaning to servers.
The Irony of “Service” — Is Waiter Demeaning?
There is a profound irony in the shift toward the term server. In the push to move away from “waiter” and “waitress”—titles often unfairly viewed as “low-status”—we adopted a word that is etymologically much closer to servant. While “waiting at table” implies a skilled professional standing at the ready, “serving” stems from the Latin servus, meaning slave or servant. By trying to sanitize the title, we traded a term of professional action for one of historical submission. It’s a perfect example of how linguistic changes intended to be “progressive” can sometimes land much further off the mark than the original “normal” term. When we look at waiter vs server through a historical lens, we see that the push for gender neutrality accidentally revived a term of servitude.
Alas, these changes in language come about without the public understanding, at large, why they are happening. We simply take on the new forms slowly and adapt. However, it is perfectly fine to refer to a female server as a waiter, and if you do, and one gets offended, you can explain to her what you have read here!
Waiter vs Server: It’s NOT Newspeak!
No, this has nothing to do with “newspeak.” This is a term pseudo-intellectuals like to use for any language that is deemed “politically correct” because they think it makes them sound smart, educated, and tuned in. (Note to self: Be careful of the word “pseudo-intellectual” as it is the word most often used by pseudo-intellectuals!)
Newspeak was a made-up language in George Orwell’s book, 1984, and the idea behind it was to make it impossible for citizens to express dissent or to commit a “thoughtcrime.”
Language evolution naturally sheds redundant or superfluous terms as they become unnecessary to our understanding of the world. Newspeak is done intentionally to influence not only what people say, but what they think. While this can be used for evil or manipulative purposes, if you use the term waiter, it does no harm to you or anyone else.
It has long been true that both federal and state laws prohibit any reference to sex, race, color, creed, national origin, age, etc., in relation to hiring. Thus, if a restaurant was hiring servers, they were not supposed to, for instance, put up a sign saying “Waitress wanted” but instead a sign reading “waiter/waitress” or “server.”
Many people think that language is simply a reflection of how society works. As I discuss in the language of food, language doesn’t just reflect society; it constructs it. Choosing gender-neutral terms is a way of dismantling old underpinnings, but others hold, as I do, that language is a basic means of constructing AND maintaining that societal structure.
This is why people seek to change the social constructs of language that they are opposed to. They recognize that changing the language can change the very underpinnings of societal norms. Whether you like it or not, such a change is paramount for the continued evolution of society.
It should be mentioned, though, that just because people adopt and use gender-neutral terms, or even accept that waiter can mean male or female, does not mean that those using the terms have changed their attitudes toward gender equality. Ultimately, the waiter vs server debate shows that while we can change our vocabulary, the history of the words remains.
More Food History You Say? Don’t “Wait” Tuck In to These Linguistic Treats
- The Language of Food: My main pillar on how culinary names shape our identity.
- Redundant Food Names: Why we say “Chai Tea” and other linguistic stumbles.
- Picnic Etymology: More polite language gone wrong! The controversy around the word picnic is yet another example of how a “moral” linguistic correction was based on a complete myth.
- The Origin of the Word Barbecue: Another case of a word’s “base form” being misunderstood.
- Is There a “Free Lunch?”: A lighter look at restaurant-based idioms.
