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Ten to five years ago I was reading MSDN Magazine, and in a few articles I stumbled upon sentences like "The user should... She needs to...", with "she" referring to the user. Unfortunately I can't find anymore the original quotes, but this was the gist of them. Now, English is not my native language (French is), and I wondered then why was the author using "she" where I would have used "he" or (even then) "they".

I know there are related questions here, but I don't think mine is exactly a duplicate. What I'm really asking here is whether "she" may have been considered in the recent past a more inclusive pronoun than "he".

It seems that - at least according to SE Code of Conduct - singular "they" is nowadays an acceptable default when nothing is known about someone's gender preference. My intuition is that a few years ago using "she" may have been a - maybe American English - attempt for inclusiveness, but I'd really like to hear the opinion of native speakers on this feeling of mine.

odalet
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  • Among some people and usually even within this group only for a short time. Singular they is, I believe, the preferred usage today (you could give a link to this). – Edwin Ashworth Jul 14 '20 at 14:05
  • @EdwinAshworth, I already tended to use "they" as the English equivalent of French "on" (which is a sort of neutral plural or singular pronoun in French), but SE CoC indicates singular "they" as the preferred default pronoun until someone requests a more suitable one for their particular case. I hope my rephrasing and links make this § more accurate. – odalet Jul 14 '20 at 14:17
  • In school (northwest US) in the 2000s I was encouraged to use 'she' instead of 'he' for generic/abstract persons – but with full awareness this was not the norm. Even in the 2000s there was much less public awareness/acceptance of being non-binary, so the use of she was less about inclusivity than about undermining patriarchy – Unrelated Jul 14 '20 at 14:22
  • @Unrelated: this is interesting; I seem to recall the author of these articles was a man, maybe this was a (subtle) way of expressing his sponsorship of feminism (rather than global inclusivity). – odalet Jul 14 '20 at 15:00
  • @EdwinAshworth, while there are respectable reasons for using singular they, and while many respectable people follow that practice, many other respectable people continue to consider it objectionable; I thus don't think that it can be said that it is the preferred usage today. – jsw29 Jul 14 '20 at 15:12
  • @Laurel: Great! This is indeed exactly what I was looking for! Thanks for pointing to this! – odalet Jul 14 '20 at 15:12
  • @jsw29 this is why I edited my question: replaced 'the preferred usage' with 'seems acceptable'. – odalet Jul 14 '20 at 15:16
  • @odalet, yes, and your remark about they was carefully worded in that it was specifically about the SE code; my comment was directed at Mr. Ashworth, who seemed to be saying that it is the preferred option among the speakers of the language in general. Incidentally, people who use she in this way do not think that she is itself ''a more inclusive pronoun than "he"'; rather they think that by using she in this way they are balancing out the practice of using he in the same way, and are so contributing to more gender-neutrality in the language on the whole, in the long run. – jsw29 Jul 14 '20 at 16:53
  • @jsw29, thanks for the elaborate comment; along with others' experiences here and the other answer, it confirms and refines what I suspected concerning this seeminlgy weird use of "she". – odalet Jul 14 '20 at 18:04
  • While singular they is useful, it's also handy to use she/he to distinguish multiple persons. Example: Alice and Bob in communications protocols. – Andrew Lazarus Jul 15 '20 at 04:05
  • I'll just refer to this from Wikipedia: 'According to the third edition, The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (edited by Burchfield and published in 1996) singular they has not only been widely used by good writers for centuries, but is now generally accepted, except by some conservative grammarians, including the Fowler of 1926, who, it is argued, ignored the evidence.' (bolding, of course, mine). It's the only reference I've found (in a quick search) to general acceptability/unacceptability, though of course some style guides ... – Edwin Ashworth Jul 15 '20 at 15:39
  • hold the opposite view (though I've not seen anywhere 'generic he // he/she // s/he is the preferred (modal) usage'). – Edwin Ashworth Jul 15 '20 at 15:39
  • @EdwinAshworth, its being nowadays 'generally accepted' is not the same as its being 'the preferred usage today'. – jsw29 Jul 16 '20 at 23:18
  • @jsw29 Macmillan: << generally: (3) ... by most people, or in most instances ... generally accepted/regarded/considered: He is generally accepted as the world’s greatest expert in the field. >> New Fowler's 'generally' therefore certainly licenses 'preferred' (liked or wanted more than another; CED). – Edwin Ashworth Jul 17 '20 at 11:13
  • @EdwinAshworth, 'generally accepted' in the quoted example does not establish that preferred is interchangeable with accepted; to see that consider 'He is generally accepted as one of the world's greatest experts'. Singular they is nowadays 'generally accepted' as one of the ways of avoiding the generic he; whether it is the best way continues to be a matter of opinion, as can be seen on several pages of this site. – jsw29 Jul 17 '20 at 16:23
  • 'APA endorses the use of “they” as a singular third-person pronoun in the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. This means it is officially good practice in scholarly writing to use the singular “they.” ' [APA Style] – Edwin Ashworth Jul 17 '20 at 18:34

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