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As far as I understand, English nouns do not have a 'gender' so to speak - when I say the word 'manager' I may be referring to a woman or to a man, one cannot infer the gender just by hearing the word. This is different of French, for instance, where you may use directeur to a man and directrice to a woman.

I have been reading a lot of texts and papers on management lately and I have noticed some texts where the authors usually use she to refer to a leader or manager, as in the snippets below:

The product owner herself should generally not come up with new ideas or changes [...]

Or

An analyst may work on an upcoming large feature that she feels hasn't received enough attention [...]

Or

[...] assume that the customer identifies [...] she then selects an additional 30% more work [...]

My question is:- is there any reason as to why the author (who is American) has chosen to refer to customer, analyst and product owner using she? Or does it not make any difference at all and the author could well have used he without any issue?

I am assuming it does have a reason to say she, otherwise the author would've said she/he (she/he feels hasn't received enough attention) and himself/herself (The product owner herself/himself)

Let me just stress out one point case someone gets jumpy:- I am not being sexist - I don't care if the author says he or she or the person or the being. All I am trying to do is understand if there is a special reason as to why he treated those roles as female roles. I may also add that in my native language every noun has a gender, as in French or Portuguese, and therefore treating a noun as a female one in English puzzles me a bit.

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    It has to do with being politically correct. Traditionally in English, the masculine was the generic gender (if you didn't know the natural gender of a person, you used he/him/his) but, over time, this came to be perceived as sexist. Using she/her/hers instead is one way people have chosen to 'counteract' the traditional method, so to speak. More commonly, however, people are using singular they. – Anonym Sep 07 '14 at 20:17
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    You don't provide much context to your citations, and while I agree with Anonym, I would amplify a couple of points. I have noticed an increasing frequency in some publications to deal with the political correctness issue by alternating the pronouns used, so that male pronouns might be used in one paragraph, and female pronouns in the next. Also, in older publications, where there was an expectation that the readership was mostly female, the pronouns used were feminine. I remember reading old nursing and teaching journals where the nurse or teacher was always referred to as "she". – brasshat Sep 07 '14 at 20:36
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    A particularly elegant use I have observed is that of Renaat Declerck, who always refers to the Speaker of an utterance as 'she' and to its Hearer as 'he'. – StoneyB on hiatus Sep 07 '14 at 20:52
  • So the decision to use either he or she is solely driven by the will to iron out sexism from the language. Very fair reason. Good to know - thanks everyone for promptly responding. –  Sep 07 '14 at 20:53
  • If you have two people in your scenario, a neat trick is to make one of them male and the other one female, and then the pronouns will actually be able to distinguish them. – Peter Shor Sep 07 '14 at 23:46

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