I’m not a native English speaker, so forgive my ignorance, but isn’t “women” a noun, not an adjective? Why not just say “female artists” or “female writers”?
As a side note, I’ve also literally never seen anyone say “men artists” or “men writers”. What gives?
The English language is unusual in that it doesn’t have gendered nouns, so we find other, often quite clumsy, ways to indicate it. You’re right that it doesn’t make sense grammatically; we say it that way simply because it scans better.
Patriarchy. Society defaults to the male. That’s not unique to the English-speaking world, of course.
By this I meant that people more often say something like “male nurse” than “man nurse”, but I agree, fuck the patriarchy.
Because male nurses are uncommon and in that specific circumstance female is the default that most people assume.
Yeah. Regarding gendered nouns, it can be hard to deal with referring to a professional of an unknown gender since the default is generally male.