Curious, then, that the author chooses to gender them. If the author used 'they' or rewrote sentences to be gender-neutral, it'd be one less bit of entropy.
As much as it pains social justice warriors today, in English, the words 'he', 'his', and 'him' have a gender neutral usage.
And in any case, saying that a computer science security researcher is male is way less than a bit of entropy.
'He' is sometimes used in this fashion, but it is an uncommon use, and it's arguable that in some contexts the author actually means a man and has not considered the possibility of a woman. Certainly in this case, why would you assume that it is used in a gender-neutral sense?
> And in any case, saying that a computer science security researcher is male is way less than a bit of entropy.
Fair point.
[1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-they-be-accepted-as-a-singul...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_English#P...
It may be partly due to my background (I studied law [in the UK], and it is law that all statutes refering to 'he' be read in a gender-neutral fashion unless it is clear that the opposite is intended[0]), but I never assume that 'he' refers to a man unless that is obvious from the context. The gender-neutral usage of 'he' is fairly widespread.
[0] FWIW, the updated Interpretation Act (from 1978) applied the same to 'she', though I don't recall ever reading a statute that used 'she' as the gender-neutral term.
Says someone unfamiliar with Indo-European languages in general?