In languages with masculine and feminine gender, the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender, and to groups of people of mixed gender. Thus, in French the feminine plural pronoun "elles" always designates an all-female group of people (or stands for a group of nouns all of feminine gender), but the masculine equivalent "ils" may refer to a group of males or masculine nouns, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In such cases, one says that the feminine gender is semantically marked, whereas the masculine gender is unmarked.