words - If 'little girl' is 「少女」, then why is 'little boy' 「少年」?

Question

少女 means little girl because 少 means little/small and 女 means lady/female. It makes sense here. However it does not make sense when I read 少年 because 年 means year. Is there any reason why 年 was used instead of 男 which means men/male?

Research

My stackexchange search skills are poor, and my search attempts did not yield anything relevant to my question. Googling something however gave me this Wikipedia page.

It said:

Shōnen (少年?), shonen, or shounen, is a kango word that literally means few years and generally refers to a typical boy from elementary school through high school age. It is used in everyday conversation when referring to the period of youth, including in legal wording referencing youth, without regard to gender.

So if my understanding is correct 少年 means young person regardless of gender (because small years or few years [of living] means the person is still young).

However, this does not answer my question as to why the counterpart of 少女 is 少年 and not 少男.

Some expert opinion on this would be appreciated because the Wikipedia article I quoted has the superscript clarification needed.

Answer

Im no expert in Japanese but macraf's comment somehow enlightened me to an answer.

In English, we have nouns like god, actor, waiter etc. These nouns do not necessarily denote a gender because they are supersets. Their subsets are: god & goddess for god, actor & actress for actor and waiter and waitress for waiter.

Visually it's like:

  god            actor            waiter
  / \             / \              / \
god goddess   actor actress   waiter waitress

As you can see, the superset is also the word for the male, and the one for the female is another word.

So in the case of the question, 少年 is the superset for young people. Following the above example, it will also be the word for the male, and the word for the female is another word, 少女.

  少年

  /  |
少年 少女