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nawitus

Is political correctness more valuable than technical ability these days?

My personal opinion is to make "he" gender neutral again. According to Wikipedia, "he" used to be gender neutral[1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...

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Being respectful of diverse groups of people and technical ability are not mutually exclusive.

Your question was discussed at length in the post above. Part of your ability to function on a team requires empathy – deliberately choosing to be antagonistic over an admittedly small effort to be more inclusive shows lurking problems in that area

If you'd read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_English#Pr... as linked to from your link, you would have seen that there has been issues caused by this style guideline actively preventing women from entering professions.

Also, if you look at historical language, it has never in English to say that 'he' was gender neutral. It would be more correct to interpret it as "women are not real". See also "Mr and Mrs John Doe".

It seems like though it was used as gender neutral only for undefined gender. So if one knew for a fact that a given person is female, "he" would not be appropriate anymore.

But when writing documentation, you are unaware of who it is for, so it would be a valid use of gender neutral he, correct?

Yep. But the gender undefined pronoun would be the male pronoun. So while semantically it would be gender neutral, from an overall perspective it's still male-centric. And we might want to have a way to refer to humans in a completely gender neutral way without ever having to explicitly specify it. But still, I guess using 'he' as a universal pronoun would be the most elegant solution. Although you can imagine some not liking it's historical baggage.

Singular 'they' has been in use for far longer than gender-neutral 'he', and is more inclusive. It is also used in virtually all modern tech writing. I'm really not sure what people have against it.

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