Yesterday, Julia Gillard was elected parliamentary leader of the Labor Party and sworn in as Australia’s newest Prime Minister.

The media has made much of her sex. There have been lots of “first female prime minister” stories. SBS, which ought know better, described the idea of “having a woman leader” as a “novelty”.

I’m interested in the way we seem squeamish about the W word. It’s OK to refer to Gillard as the “first female prime minister”, but I feel like I have yet to read that she’s the “first woman prime minister”.

So I went Googling. And I’m not impressed.

Searches on Google News reveal the following results:

• gillard female: 1,491 results
• gillard woman: 721 results

Based on what I’ve read, that’s not surprising. Roughly 2:1 using ‘female’ rather than ‘woman’. Next test:

• gillard first female: 1,552 results
• gillard first woman: 697 results

How can that be? How can a more restrictive search (‘gillard first female’) return more results than a less restrictive search (‘gillard female’)? Let’s try something else:

• gillard first female: 1,529 results
• gillard female first: 1,465 results

This is getting silly. I’m beginning to think that the number of results that Google says it finds is just a made-up random number.

But this does not detract from my quest: Why are we so afraid of calling someone a woman?

Julia Gillard was this morning elected as parliamentary leader of the Labor Party, which means that she will be Australia’s next Prime Minister. Just give the GG a day or two to get organized and swear her in. Wayne Swan was elected her deputy.

ABC News Online published this photo this morning.

Julia looks euphoric, as you’d expect. Wayne is… Wayne is… What would Cal Lightman make of Wayne’s microexpression?