text: Genealogy Kinship charts use a triangle  for male and circle  for female. Pedigree charts published in scientific papers use an earlier anthropological convention of a square  for male and a circle  for female.
  Before a shape distinction was adopted, all individuals had been represented by a circle in Morgan's 1871 System of Consanguinity and Affinity of Human Family, where gender is encoded in the abbreviations for the kin relation (e.g. M for 'mother' and F for 'father'). W. H. R. Rivers distinguished gender in the words of the language being recorded by writing male kinship terms in all capitals and female kinship terms with normal capitalization. That convention was quite influential for a time, and his convention of prioritizing male kin by placing them to the left and females to the right continues to this day though there have been exceptions, such as Margaret Mead, who placed females to the left.
  Linguistics
  In linguistics, a 'grammatical gender' system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender, typically 'masculine', 'feminine', and 'neuter'. In addition to  and , Unicode encodes a symbol for the neuter gender, .