I'm surprised these days whenever I read something vaguely academic that _doesn't_. It seems fairly standard among philosophers, and in other contexts, people take care to alternate.
I, too, try to use his/her has consistantly as possible. However I don't understand why failure to use "she" or "her" is intepreted as an assertation of male dominence.
I certainly don't interpret it as an assertion of male dominance - just a holdover of a writing convention that doesn't accurately represent the world.
Because we know of the convention of using "he" and "him" to represent any unknown person, we can easily generalize it to "she" and "her". It's certainly easier to alternate between genders in different examples than to constantly use "him or her" or any of the other convoluted expressions that indicate either gender.
My Estonian friend was complaining about this — they don't have gendered pronouns.. so she was complaining that when you say "I went out with my friend and they something-something" everyone knows it was someone of a gender in which you might be romantically interested. (how's that for awkward phrasing? :-)
I often found it funny when talking to Hungarians who (despite having spoken English for years and years) would occasionally mix up "he" and "she" - sometimes even "it". English speakers are amazed at learning languages where there is more than one non-trivial gender. Hungarian speakers are amazed that there's more than one gender at all!
I wonder if any Uralic languages have any grammatical gender at all. And now I wonder how much non-Indo-European families use gender. I know Swahili has something like 18 genders, so it's clearly not just an IE phenomenon, but perhaps other families have similarly diverse types of genders that have little or nothing to do with human sex/gender.
i guess i'm not terribly surprised, but it seems that in fields where women are few, it's easy to automatically assign everyone male pronouns. even i am guilty of making that mistake on occasion, sadly.
so yes, not surprised, but appreciative, because i honestly would not have noticed if he'd used "he" and "him."
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i particularly appreciated that the writer referred to a potential grad student as "her" and "she".
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Because we know of the convention of using "he" and "him" to represent any unknown person, we can easily generalize it to "she" and "her". It's certainly easier to alternate between genders in different examples than to constantly use "him or her" or any of the other convoluted expressions that indicate either gender.
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p.s. Hi Kenny!!
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I wonder if any Uralic languages have any grammatical gender at all. And now I wonder how much non-Indo-European families use gender. I know Swahili has something like 18 genders, so it's clearly not just an IE phenomenon, but perhaps other families have similarly diverse types of genders that have little or nothing to do with human sex/gender.
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well, maybe not. (-:
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so yes, not surprised, but appreciative, because i honestly would not have noticed if he'd used "he" and "him."