I asked this some time ago, OP, but I was jumped on and accused with some bile of being an MRA who clearly saw women as inferior, for some reason....
I prefer actor but don't get why there are separate awards for best male and female actor. I don't see that it is necessary. Just one award for best actor.
I suppose the thinking is that, however amazing at acting a woman is, unless it’s one of these new, niche –look at me— ‘alternative spin’ productions, she will never be chosen to play Hamlet or one of the other male people/characters, which tend to be in the great majority - especially as the leads.
It's sexist. Actor is the norm and actress is 'woman version' seen as not the norm.
But, as has been said, why does the traditionally-accepted male version become the norm. Everything that goes ‘gender-neutral’ seems to involve dropping the female identity and mainstreaming the male one for everything and everybody.
The next logical step is surely to drop ‘woman’, because it’s presumably an ‘inferior’ descriptor, and just call all adults ‘men’. Would people really want that? When those with their own –agendas—paradigms spell it as ‘womxn’ or similar, so that it doesn’t have the word ‘men’ inside it, the vast majority of us despise and condemn it.
she harked back to a distant time when Actress was a euphemism for prostitute and she thought female actors should be given the same status as male actors.
But it hasn’t been understood that way in living memory by anybody. Lots of common words have chequered histories from centuries ago, but we accept them as they are understood now.
The word 'Wales' originally meant 'foreigners' or 'strangers', but I don't hear any proud Welsh people nowadays rejecting the word for their nation, claiming that it 'others' or 'belittles' them by suggesting that they are not/less 'British' and/or are only defined by their not being English.
Most women don’t object to being referred to as a ‘lady’ – indeed, it’s the default that we teach children to use to refer to an adult female whose name they don’t know – but it’s from Old English meaning ‘somebody who makes/kneads bread’. Not that there’s anything at all wrong with making bread, but it’s a very narrow way to describe a person: we have the ‘(gentle)men’ who do all the exciting and important things that human adults do in life, and then we have the ‘ladies’, who are just there to make bread. 