In the navy it becomes a little more confusing where an able seaman will be known as, general list warfare, and a helicopter crewman will be known as a loadmaster, as opposed to a mistress.
The Minister in charge of our gender neutral police force Judith Collins sniffed at the suggestion that women don't like being called a woman anymore. Not if their job title's based on a gender, she growled.
And that seemed to be echoed by an academic from Massey, who was interestingly described as a feminist commentator. By dropping the man off titles it stopped women questioning if it was a job that they could do.
What ever happened to the notion that girls could do anything? Surely women these days aren't put off applying for a job because of a title and it beggars belief that an employer would reject a female applicant because the title didn't fit. For starters it'd be against the law.
And if they're so concerned with the offensive man word being tacked on to a title, what about human which is derived from Latin meaning man.
When the gender neutral Winston Peters was asked about that word and its male connotation and whether it needed changing as well, he was adamant.
It's a description of a species, he argued, adding with pearly whites gleaming, that looking around Parliament you could be forgiven for not understanding that, before heading off chuckling at his own quick witted sense of humour.