Female or feminine; male or masculine?
We use female and male to refer to the sex of humans and animals: …

feminine | American Dictionary

feminine
adjective
us/ˈfem·ə·nən/

feminineadjective (FEMALE)

having qualities traditionally considered to be suitable for a woman:
Even with the tailored look of a suit, sometimes I like to have something that’s just a little feminine.

feminineadjective (GRAMMAR)

[ not gradable ] grammar (abbreviationfem.)
being a noun or pronoun of a type that refers to females, or in some other languages, being a noun of a type that refers to things considered as female

femininity

noun[ U ]us/ˌfem·əˈnɪn·ət̬·i/
Long hair has traditionally been regarded as a sign of femininity.

Examples of feminine

feminine
The same pronoun is used for both masculine and feminine individuals and for subject and object case roles.
Perhaps, certain cultural (medical) practices elaborate on masculine, or respectively, feminine, themes.
Like cooking, cleaning, shopping, and washing, men can do it too, but the societal perception is that these are women's tasks or feminine gendered activities.
Although there were many women in rock by the late 1960s, most performed only as singers, a traditionally feminine position in popular music.
Representations of feminine desire abound in seventeenth-century music and then disappear with the eighteenth-century insistence on patriarchal values.
In addition, division of feminine household tasks was found to be more egalitarian at later stages of marital life.
These feminine features were comprehensively altered100 to masculine forms in a late-eleventh- or early-twelfth-century hand (or hands).
The web of these associations constitutes an artistic reflection on the sensibility and experience of the feminine in a patriarchal society.
A noun is "masculine," "feminine," or "neuter" because it belongs to a set of nouns that use a particular set of agreement markers.
Such lines are termed feminine; otherwise a line is masculine.
Given statistical evidence that has shown a very strong dispreference for basilectal variants in the feminine subcategories, this order seems highly unlikely.
The marginalised subject-position of the woman, however, reveals the pivotal role of the feminine in the narcissistic constructions of male desire and the male self.
Scenes like these consolidated a conventional association between laments and the feminine voice.
Joncieres argued earlier, for example, that 'duality' was a feminine trait.
It has a three gender system with masculine, feminine, and neuter, which is mainly reflected in the form of the articles.
See all examples of feminine
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.