In the English language, the pairs man/woman and male/female both look as if one gender or sex was considered a special case for it is denoted by putting an arbitrary prefix (wo-, fe-) before the default case (man, male).
It has been asked before whether this is actually the case etymologically, and the answer was “partially” (woman < wif+man). However, since *werman or *wereman is antiquated, what possible substitutes are there for the pair man/woman or either part thereof when you want to distinguish by gender (so cannot use person, people or human) without the implied sexism of marked and unmarked words?
The ones I can think of as a non-native speaker are either too formal, like gent/lady, or too informal, e.g. guy/gal and lad/lass, or otherwise inadequate for the general case, e.g. boy/girl. Using a French loan word man/fem(me) or a contraction/neologism man/*wom is problematic because man is also still used in a generic sense (mankind etc.), which cannot be replaced by human easily.
Likewise, which alternatives are there for male/female used as either nouns or adjectives?
I would assume masculine/feminine was a possible and preferable alternative, though available as adjectives only. The contraction or neologism male/*fele shows nice symmetry, especially with man/*fem as introduced above, but it’s artificial, and so is *mascule/*femine.
Best Answer
You are looking for a practical answer, not a theoretical one: politically correct terms that are acceptable in practice. So I looked for competing terms that are actually being adopted in the wild.
According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the proposed replacement for woman that shows evidence of adoption in literature is womyn. It is now used about one time in five thousand in place of woman.
The proposed replacement for the plural form women that shows evidence of adoption is wimmin. It is now used about one time in ten thousand in place of women.
These frequencies are very small, but have been trending upward since around 1975. They are evidence that these are the primary competing terms, but not evidence of widespread acceptance in literature.
Unlike womyn/wimmen, there is not yet a competing term for female. The term *fele has been proposed satirically, but no effort has been made to promote its actual use and there is no evidence in literature that it is gaining acceptance.