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I don't know what polite company means here. What you say is always obvious to me, I can tell when I have to keep it to small talk, and I can tell when I can move the discussion to another level of interaction.
Of course you don't start rambling about conspiracy theories during small talk. I'm going back to my leftist authoritarians argument, these people are very intolerant and want to control language, they would be the only ones taking offence with such a minor language deviation (I don't think it is but whatever, you're the native English speaker).
95% of the population won't care about someone saying female instead of woman, they won't think less of you for it, many people are socially awkward and sometimes use inappropriate words and weird sentence constructions.
That's the norm. The norm is not to be socially adjusted, most of us behave like fools in the world and that's OK. The vast majority of people out there will let it slide. I let it slide all the time, it makes me smile and I find it endearing when someone is socially awkward or says something outrageous. Sometimes it's very funny too.
It happens all the time at my workplace for example.
So you can't expect people to act according to the radical ideas of the language authoritarians. I say authoritarians because that's what they are, ostracizing or even passively disapprove of you because you say female is a way to put pressure on you to make you fall in line.
A lot of people make mistakes, particularly since many social conventions are unwritten, and often even unspoken. They also vary from place to place.
It's well known that making many such mistakes will affect how people interact with and view you over time. For you, I'm recommending the book "The Like Switch" written by Jack Shaeffer, which discusses a lot of social cues. He's not a hack pickup artist like RSD Tyler who pretends to have had "success" in the real world. Rather, he is someone with a few decades of experience working in interrogation, investigation, and research for the FBI. He's had actual success.
One social cue that people have become aware of in the past few years is that men who refer to women as females tend to be more misogynistic. I'm not sure why you're so defensive as I'm not endorsing the use of that indicator, I am merely stating that other people use it. It's a new indicator, so it's likely that in the coming years people will only become more aware of it.
Here's an article from the Chronicles of Higher Education
https://www.chronicle.com/article/He-Keeps-Calling-Us/239595
Time magazine
http://time.com/4300170/female-word/
Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_...le_woman_or_lady_as_an_adjective_a_guide.html