When it comes to farm machinery, English is a very simple language. I met with a French farm machinery friend of mine recently and we drifted into a discussion about the gender of farm machinery. This was the first time that I considered any machine to have a gender.

And while here in Ireland we might refer to a tractor using language such as, “she has plenty of power”, do we really consider machines in gender sense? Why do we say 'she' instead of 'he' when our written language does not define a machine as male or female in terms of gender? In truth there is no distinction here between masculine and feminine in English language nouns that describe farm machinery.

So that forced me to look at how tractors and farm machines are treated in other languages. And here are some examples of what I found when it comes to farm machinery genders. I can only imagine they would be impossible to learn if you were not born into the language.

In French, for example, a tractor is male, while a combine harvester is female and so too is a self-propelled silage harvester and even a square baler. The confusion comes when a round baler is male.

Just imagine the confusion to find that a plough is female, but once it becomes a reversible model, it instantly changes gender to be male. And a fertilizer spreader and sprayer are male, while a slurry tanker is female.

In the Irish language farm machinery tends to be male dominated. The tractor is called a tarracóir and it’s a male, and the combine harvester, called the inneall bainte or comhbhuainteoir is also male. The Irish for a plough is a céachta and that too is defined as a male noun.

In German, the tractor, called traktor, is male, while the combine harvester, called a Mähdrescher, is also male as is the plough called a pflug.

In Spanish the tractor is male, while the combine harvester, called the cosechadora, is female. The plough, called arado is a male, while the sprayer, called the rociada, is female. Much of the reason for the gender differences is due to the last letter in the word; often a vowel is female and a consonant ending word is a male. But not always, as I’ve found!

Is it because tractors, as part of the development of agricultural technology, are seen as a symbol of male power on the farm that the male gender influence seems to dominate the farming language in some countries? If the tractor is considered as a symbol of male domination, is it time for tractor designers to give more female expression to the appearance of the tractors of the future?