A manufacturer is a person or company that makes large quantities of products, usually in a factory. They turn raw materials into finished goods that can be sold.
From 'manufacture' plus the agent-ending '-er', making 'one who manufactures'. The root 'manufacture' comes from Latin 'manu factus' meaning 'made by hand'.
Even though modern manufacturers use machines, the word still remembers when everything was 'made by hand'. Every time you see 'manu' in a word, you’re close to something about hands or making.
Historically, industrial and commercial roles such as manufacturer were socially coded as male, especially during early industrialization when legal and social barriers restricted women’s access to capital, training, and ownership. This produced a default mental image of a male factory owner or producer, even when women and girls formed a large part of the workforce.
Use manufacturer as a gender‑neutral term for any person or company that makes goods, and avoid pairing it with unnecessary gendered assumptions (e.g., 'he' as the default pronoun). Specify gender only when it is directly relevant to the context or data.
["producer","maker","supplier","factory owner","manufacturing firm"]
Women have long been central to manufacturing, from textile mills and munitions factories to electronics assembly and modern industrial engineering, but their roles have often been recorded only as 'unskilled labor' or omitted from leadership histories.
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