Female symbol (♀)
The sign for female: a circle above a small cross. It was the sign of the planet Venus, and of copper in alchemy, before the botanist Linnaeus used it for female plants in the 18th century.
Meaning
Unicode names the character U+2640 FEMALE SIGN and gives “Venus” and “alchemical symbol for copper” as its other names. Britannica counts it, with the male symbol ♂, as one of the two most widely recognised gender symbols and describes it as a circle above a cross. It marks female in biology and medicine and on restroom signs, and Unicode’s emoji add it to a figure to make the female version of it: a runner followed by ♀ is 🏃♀️, “woman running”.
Origin and history
Like the male sign, it began with a planet. Babylonian astrologers linked the planet Venus with the fertility goddess Ishtar, Britannica writes, and the Greeks took over such links between the planets and the gods. In the crafts that worked metal each god and planet was paired with a metal: copper, base like iron but softer, went with Venus and the feminine, according to the neurologist G. D. Schott in the BMJ (2005). Britannica says copper stood for femininity, love and beauty.
Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist, used the Venus sign on his botanical charts for female plants and the Mars sign for male ones. Schott writes that he copied the signs for male and female flowers from a 17th-century pharmacopoeia, the Pharmacopoeia Leovardensis, as a shorthand “for reasons of economy in recording”, and that from botany they passed into zoology, human biology and genetics.
Venus’s hand mirror?
NASA’s page on the solar system’s symbols says the sign is “thought to be” a stylised hand mirror of Venus, the goddess of love. Schott gives a different origin as “the most established view”: a contraction, in Greek script, of the planet’s Greek name, Phosphoros. The derivation was traced in a Dutch study of 1942 by H. W. Renkema.
On family pedigrees
Around 1900 the Venus and Mars signs were common on the pedigrees in genetics papers, and leading British geneticists such as Galton and Pearson recommended them, Schott found. American geneticists preferred circles and squares, which were easier to read and took up less space, and the classical signs gradually gave way. The circle goes back to Pliny Earle, a New York asylum physician, who charted colour blindness in his own family in 1845 and wrote: “Males are represented by squares and females by circles.” A circle on a genogram today is a female family member.
Read next
- Next in Gender symbolsMale and female symbol (⚥)A circle with the male arrow and the female cross both attached: Unicode’s male and female sign. Unicode lists it for intersex and androgynous, and as “hermaphroditic” in botany; Britannica calls it a bigender sign.
- In Occult and alchemical symbolsPlanetary metals (☉ ☽ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄)The seven signs alchemists wrote for the seven metals known in antiquity, each borrowed from the heavenly body it was paired with: the sun ☉ for gold, the moon ☽ for silver, Mercury ☿ for quicksilver, Venus ♀ for copper, Mars ♂ for iron, Jupiter ♃ for tin and Saturn ♄ for lead.
See also
Male symbol (♂), Transgender symbol (⚧).
Sources
- Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 2640 FEMALE SIGN
- Sex symbols ancient and modern: their origins and iconography on the pedigree, by G. D. Schott, BMJ 2005;331(7531):1509–1510, doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1509, BMJ (PubMed Central full text), Classical origins; Squares and circles
- Solar System Symbols, NASA Science, NASA, The Symbols
- Gender symbol, by August Samie, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 21 November 2025 (Internet Archive copy, 13 December 2025), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction; history
- emoji-test.txt, Emoji Keyboard/Display Test Data for UTS #51, version 18.0, 30 April 2026, Unicode Consortium, person-activity; gender
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or crosses.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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