Don Johnson

In my (limited) understanding, grammatical gender is used to match pronouns to nouns, or nouns to nouns, etc. One thing tho is that Greek is like 1950’s English, sometimes a male plural form is used for a group that includes females or it could be all males. Therefore a MEMBER of that maxed group could be a female that matches up with the singular masculine term.

In English, a waitress could be in a group of men and therefore is an example of a man (but man in this case needs to be understood as generic, as in human). So a waitress can be a man (generic), but a man (masculine now assumed to be understood) cannot be a waitress.

However, if Phoebe were simply a servant-girl, she could be called a diakonissa, since Paul did NOT do this, the translation should steer away from this choice, which is exactly what some do NOT do, like the ESV.