女 in oracle bone form shows a woman in profile, kneeling with hands clasped or arms folded — a posture associated with the social and ritual roles women held in Bronze Age society. Identical across 繁體 / 新字体 / 简体.

As a radical, 女 is one of the most productive in the script, generating an entire family of relationship/female-role characters: 媽 / 妈 (mother), 姉 / 姐 (older sister), 妹 (younger sister), 姫 / 姬 (princess), 婦 / 妇 (wife/woman), 妻 (wife), 嫁 (bride), 婚 (marriage), 娘 (daughter / Japanese: young lady), 好 (good — woman + child), 安 (peace — woman under a roof), 始 (begin — historically "woman + birth-giving"). Anything social-relationship or family-role tends to use 女 as its semantic anchor.

Mandarin: nǚ, dipping 3rd tone. 女人 (nǚrén, woman), 女儿 (nǚ'ér, daughter), 女生 (nǚshēng, female student), 女朋友 (nǚpéngyou, girlfriend), 男女 (nánnǚ, men and women). Note the umlaut on the pinyin — the vowel is the rounded "ü" sound, not "u".

Japanese: on-readings ジョ (jo) in 女性 (josei, woman/female), 女子 (joshi, female), 少女 (shōjo, young girl — and a whole manga genre); ニョ (nyo) in 女房 (nyōbō, wife — older usage). The kun-readings split: おんな (onna) is the everyday word for "woman", め (me) is archaic and survives in compounds like 乙女 (otome, maiden — a literary register).

The Japanese suffix -子 (-ko) on 女 names — 花子 (Hanako), etc. — combines 子 from the previous entry with the female cultural marker.

Memory aid: a kneeling figure with crossed arms — the original posture preserved in the strokes.