I’m retired AF, and no, nobody purposefully addressed a female officer as “Sir”. The only time I ever saw it close to happening was in Basic Training, where a trainee said “Yes, Sir…Ma’am”
So no, in the real AF, it doesn’t happen. TV is not real life.
I’ve got to admit, I’m unaware of a specific military regulation specifying that only male officers are to be addressed by subordinates as “sir” and female officers are only to be addressed as “ma’am”. But, for example, see FM21.13, Section 4.18:
A soldier addressing a higher ranking officer uses the word sir or ma’am in the same manner as a polite civilian speaking with a person to whom he wishes to show respect. In the military service, the matter of who says sir or ma’am to whom is clearly defined; in civilian life it is largely a matter of discretion. In the case of NCOs and soldiers, we address them by their rank because they’ve earned that rank.
Polite civilians in my experience don’t address women as “sir”.
No, I have YOU saying that, based on misreading an article on psychologytoday.com.
Your cite simply does not say this. It says the exact opposite. As the proportion of female officers increases, the mistaken tendency to address them as sir will fade.
And this is just odd. I’m not the arbiter of anything. I’m not “stopping” anyone from doing anything. I’m telling you, from first hand experience, what the actual protocol in the real-world U.S. military is. So is every other veteran in this thread. None of us ever encountered “sir” intentionally being used as a form of address for a female officer. It’s just not something that happens in the real world.
I will add my 27 years of military experience to confirm everything you are saying is correct.
That was my original supposition (or in the Royal Navy) but I can’t find any evidence of it. Films and TV get things wrong all the time, but it really seems weird that the notion of calling women “Sir”, was created out of whole cloth.
So here’s my WAG: Once upon a time, a role that a screenwriter intended to be male, was cast with a woman, and nobody changed the dialog accordingly. Other writers saw this and assumed addressing female officers as “sir” was actually a thing that happens in real life and started using it.
In the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, there was a tradition of addressing junior officers as “Mister Lastname”, interchangeably with “Ensign Lastname” (I wasn’t a Sailor, so I don’t know if that’s current practice). I think, and any Sailors reading this please correct me if I’m wrong, as women began to be commissioned as naval officers and assigned to ships, at least initially “Mister” was actually used as a unisex form of address for junior officers. Hollywood screenwriters may well have extrapolated using “Sir” as a unisex form of address from that. But I’m not sure if female naval officers were actually addressed as “Mister” in real life.
Beyond that, though:
I doubt it would have been anything so involved. If it wasn’t an exaggerated extrapolation as I suggested above, more likely it just seemed “truthy” to screenwriters with no military background, as something that should be true. It may have had enough truthiness that the screenwriters “remembered” coming across it in their research, and included it as a flavorful bit to illustrate the differences between military and civilian life.
Beyond that, though, most if not all the examples anyone in this thread can come up were from fantasy militaries, or at least militaries in fantasy shows. In those shows, it may well have been a deliberate choice by the screenwriter to illustrate the differences in gender roles in their fictional universe.
Along those lines, @spifflog, I’m wondering about the examples you encountered in Fringe and WandaVision.
In Fringe, was the use of “sir” for a female officer from the military of Our Universe (which I don’t think featured much in the show), or the militarized Fringe Division of the Other Universe? If the latter, it may well have been a deliberate choice - the writers sprinkled the dialogue of the Other Universe characters with alternate terms and usages (“showme” for “ID” being the one I remember"). If it was Other Astrid, that might have been a deliberate writing choice to illustrate her cinematic version of Autism.
For WandaVision, was it SWORD personnel that used “sir” for a female officer? If so, that might also have been a deliberate affectation for a fantasy organization founded by a woman.
As I noted up thread, never in my 30-plus years as a Naval Officer did I ever hear a female Officer called “Sir” or “Mister.” I remember being called “Mr Spiff” when I was first in the Navy in the late 1980s be I don’t hear that much anymore.
I my two joint tours I didn’t hear the other Services using “Sir” for female Officers either. It was either rank, “Ensign Jones” or “Ma’am.”
AFI 1-1 says that officers can be referred to as “sir” or “ma’am”, but admittedly it does not actually specify that those are gendered terms. I can tell you that as an NCO I would correct anyone calling a female officer “sir” intentionally, and if they continued to do so, formal reprimands and paperwork would follow. The only exception would be if a woman preferred being called sir, in which case I’d allow it based on a plain reading of the AFI, which again, doesn’t specify gender. But I’ve never seen that.
I have accidentally said “yes sir” to women, out of habit, as have most servicemembers (I’m guessing). To me, it’s embarrassing, and people (again, usually) quickly apologize. It’s a pretty textbook microaggression – I’ve never accidentally said “yes ma’am” to a man. “Yes sir” is a default response, and “yes ma’am” requires a bit more thought, and that’s just a small example of how are brains are conditioned to be sexist.
In my experience, calling women “sir” is not something that’s being normalized.
Well, that’s that, then. I’ve found a couple of online references to “Mister” being used as a unisex term, but nothing particularly credible. Maaaybe in the Royal Navy? Either way, if it was ever used, it apparently wasn’t common.
And, yeah, I’ve served in “purple” environments, and served with Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen, and never heard “Sir” intentionally being used to address female officers by members of any service.
I think we’ve all done that - I know I have. As it was clearly unintentional, my rapid “sorry ma’am” was met with a smile and a hand wave.
I also concur that no women I know, either senior civilians or military want to be called “sir.”
And that IRL officers will be sensible enough to not get bent out of shape over minor mistakes is not the same thing as that it is becoming the accepted practice.
Although in one more organizational generation we may be in fact seeking to officially de-binary the form of address. But we will know when that happens since it will involve task forces, blue-ribbon committees, articles and letters in Proceedings of the Naval Institute, seminars at the War College, hearings with generals trying to avoid rolling their eyes or facepalming at the Senators, and a million online posts claiming this is the doom of us all.
Talking of media writing, in one episode of the TV show M-A-S-H, a flustered Radar addresses Maj. Houlihan as “sir”. She energically corrects him, “Sir is for men, ma’am is for women. I’m a woman: I’m a ma’am!” Of course the gag is that Loretta Swit divers the line in a way that makes it sound like “I’m a woman: I’m a man”
In Star Trek its is understandable to the extent that they were part of a multi-species federation and making use of Sir as a gender-neutral term makes some sense, since other species will not necessarily have the same concepts of gender and sex as humans do.
The Janeway “ma’am preference” came into being since it was demanded by the actress. Same way she insisted on calling B"lanna, Miss Torres.
I made that mistake once that I was aware of - I immediately corrected myself and got a sharp glare, but nothing else. I may well have made the mistake on other occasions without realizing it, of course, but if I did, no one called me on it.
As a civilian, I’ve actually made the opposite mistake. In my job, I frequently speak with nurses, lab staff, and medical office and support staff, who are mostly, even overwhelmingly, female. I have on a couple of occasions addressed a male nurse over the phone as “ma’am”.
To muddy things up the Army does not allow Junior commissioned officers to be called “mister” however it is proper to call warrant officers “mister.” In reality I have only heard warrants called “chief” or “sir.” I also noticed that most pilot warrants prefer to be called “sir” and most ground warrants had no problem being called “Chief.” Aviation was in the beginning of my career and I was in Attack Helicopter Battalions so my experience was with all male pilots.
That’s quite interesting and difficult for me to imagine doing. Not intended as a disagreement or rebuttal but in the Canadian military we call female superior officers “ma’am”, never “sir”.
My guess is that the scriptwriters decided, “Hey, here’s the best way to make the future military seem different than the rest of their society: let’s have everyone call the women ‘sir’!”
The only “Hollywood” example that I can think of is MASH, Radar, and maybe other characters, would sometimes, or often, call Major Houlihan “Sir”. Major Houlihan would be very annoyed by this. I assumed this was for comedic effect, not Hollywood assuming female officers were called “Sir”
Probably the same reason they think car crashes tend cause cars to blow up in a fireball, or that people falling down elevator shafts can self-arrest with their fingers after falling 3 stories, or…
They think it makes better TV/movies.
I asked a friend who is in the military and consults television and films on military protocol. Senior military officers are called, “Ma’am.”
As stated above, I was actually in the military, and every female officer is called “Ma’am”, senior or not.
YOU may not have said “ma’am” to a man, but I can assure you that some people do. I do call center work. I’m a man, with a clearly-masculine name and a deep voice, and yet a surprising number of people who call in somehow manage call me “ma’am.”
You are seeing “microagression” (what an idiotic term, by the way!) and sexism where no such thing exists.