Comment by ispivey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ispivey | Hacker News Reader

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There's a bunch of research suggesting that using "he" as a neuter pronoun makes women feel excluded: - First experiment/study I found: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12... - Links to more research on the subject: http://alyx.io/educational-resources/gender.html#generic-mas...

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a good piece of satire explaining why it's oppressive by s/man/white, etc: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

Contrary to what you say, "they" was used as the singular neuter pronoun for a long time, until a concentrated effort to force it out of use in the 1800s. Some examples from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824352. Some history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Given it's possibly (likely) ostracizing and there's nothing categorically wrong about using "they" as a singular neuter pronoun, I think you're on the wrong side of this.

People should certainly stop fighting; the answer is to just roll with "they".

Thanks for all those links — I wasn't aware of those studies (especially not about the deliberate effort to force the singular "they" out of use) and I think they have definitely influenced my conscious personal writing style (I do tend to avoid gendered pronouns anyway).

I will agree that I was on the wrong side of this in the sense that "he" is more or equally preferable to "they", but I made another point too — that this entire topic is a giant bikeshed.

You say "people should certainly stop fighting", but do you then imply that fighting for "they" is justified? Personally, I don't think it is.

I use gender-neutral pronouns unless context dictates otherwise, but I want you to consider something.

If a policy (or lack thereof) is correlated with women feeling excluded or intimidated, it doesn't necessarily mean that the policy (or lack thereof) is a bad thing.

If women tend to feel intimidated by eye contact with men with whom they are in competition, it doesn't mean such eye contact should be banned. If women tend to feel feel excluded if the founding members of an organization or club are all men, it doesn't mean men should be forced to find a woman before founding an organization or club.

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