Is "manpower" politically correct? (2025)

I am writing a research paper on how the amount of hours put in by an architect affects the customer's perceived quality of service. Would "manpower input" be the correct term to describe the amount of hours spent on a project or "human resource allocation" or "manpower allocation"? Most of the literature I've come across so far uses "manpower allocation," but I had thought that "manpower" would no longer be politically correct to use.

If anyone has a good suggestion for a term to use, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Flute

Canada's largest staffing company is called Manpower Canada, so obviously they don't think it's bad for business.

Never forget that somewhere out there, there is a complete nutter who is waiting to be offended by something, anything. This nut-job is only happy when pointing out the PC faults of others.

I agree with Brioche. The word is neutral, yet there are those who will take offense at
almost anything.

Here is another, somewhat unrelated thought. I once worked for a management consulting firm. Our invoices to clients used the term billable hours, or professional staff time for the consultants' manhours. Other administrative time was billed as
support staff time.

That is less direct, less clear, and less precise than man hours or manpower, but it might give the PC police less to gripe about.

Sorry to revive this old thread. It's been quite a long time, so maybe things have changed.

At my company we were doing an engineering schedule. Each task/document had a number of hours (manpower) required, and resources (people) allocated to it. When the schedule was distributed one comment (from a Spaniard) was: 'Shouldn't we change the word 'manpower' to 'personpower'?

Since we are issuing documents in English for foreign parties (we are a Spanish company) it is quite important to be politically correct. However, the proposed 'person power' sounds to me like a word invented by a non English speaking person. So I basically have two questions:

- Is 'person power' (or personpower) acceptable? (I would say no, there are no hits in WR)
- If not, is 'manpower' still acceptable, or do we have to look for a roundabout, such as the proposed 'professional staff time'?

jsvillar said:

- Is 'person power' (or personpower) acceptable? (I would say no, there are no hits in WR)

Click to expand...

You are correct, it isn't.

jsvillar said:

- If not, is 'manpower' still acceptable, or do we have to look for a roundabout, such as the proposed 'professional staff time'?

Click to expand...

It is fine in every context I can imagine.

However, I would be wary of using "man-hours" as a unit of measure. Where I work, the people in question are operators, so I tend to use operator-hours (or operator-minutes, since minutes are what our jobs are timed in), but "person-hours" is fine. I only mention this here as it was mentioned in post #5.