The character 女子 is formed through the direct semantic combination of two pictographic components: 女, which is a stylized pictogram of a person in a kneeling or submissive posture historically representing a woman, and 子, a pictogram of an infant with a large head and outstretched arms. They are placed side-by-side in their standard character forms, with 子 serving not to literally mean "child" here, but to nominalize and soften the term, creating a single conceptual unit that visually and meaningfully compounds the idea of a female person.