Male-as-norm principle
The male-as-norm principle is the belief that grammatical and lexical devices such as the use of the suffix -ess (as in actress) specifically indicating the female form, together with the use of man to mean "human" and similar phenomena promote and reinforce the perception that the male category is the norm, and that corresponding female categories are tangential and thus less important. The idea became prominent in 20th-century feminist linguistics, especially through scholars who argued that English encodes patriarchal assumptions by treating the male category as the linguistic norm.