5 November 2014
Comparison of search results using the singular and plural forms of lady, woman, girl, female, surfboard and surf-board (including surf board) with singular forms of the same gendered terms. The exception is the singular term woman, which doesn’t serve as a stem for the term women.
These graphs indicate that searches using the stems of lady, girl, and female are identical to the searches for their plural forms. The exception is woman which does not work for the plural form – women. For this reason, we used both terms – woman and women – in the Graph titled ‘Surfing and Female Surfing in Australia’ (Graph 1).
This search included newspaper articles only for all states and titles.