It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.
I guess I'm just not really understanding people getting upset at what I perceive to be completely made up problems. We have technology, we no longer have to assume gender neutral pronouns for everyone. They can just tell us the pronouns they want.
But if they reply back and their email footer has "he/him", I'm probably just gonna use he/him and not think twice about it, because I'm a well-adjusted adult.