The word chairman found itself accused of sexism in the 1970s, with critics opposed to the way it combined the notion of power with a grammatical gender bias. Two neutral alternatives were proposed, chair (which was actually recorded in this sense in the 17th century) and the neologism chairperson. Both terms faced initial resistance, and although they have now become accepted in standard English, the Oxford English Corpus shows that they are still far less common than chairman.