I don’t think I ever say “he or she” anymore. I always try to remember to write “she or he” just to try to balance things out after all of the years of reading it the other way.
I invite all of you to join me in my mini-crusade. 
I wish I knew who conducted the experiment, but in my Morals in Education class, my professor taught a unit about pronouns and inclusively, and told us about an experiment done using only male participants. The thrust of the experiment was to give them samples of writing (something about business law, I think) that used just female pronouns to read. After they’d read it, they were asked if they thought the samples meant men too. 70% said no. So much for people not being influenced by the gender of the pronouns…
But of course the male pronoun has something of a tradition of being understood as a reference either to men or to men and women alike, while the female pronoun does not. Is it really fair to expect people to understand that a word is meant to be inclusive when it doesn’t have a history of being such?
I guess I’m missing your point. A non-standard usage was misunderstood by a large number of people, and from this we conclude…
English has enough oddball inconsistancies and screwed-up conjugations and whatnot that using “they” for “third person singular” doesn’t strike me as particularly sinful.
But can anyone tell me why the Toronto NHL franchise isn’t the “Maple Leaves”?
English has a perfectly valid gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun: it. As in, “make sure your child brings its own lunch.”
“It” eliminates the grammatical problems with “them,” avoids the awkwardness of “he or she”, and is equally offensive to anyone regardless of gender.
D
Kizarvexius:
Sounds reasonable to me. Let’s do ours the other way around, though, just for the heck of it. Everyone will use the female gender in her speech to refer to the unknown singular. Womankind is better off without all this petty squabbling.
I can! When a standard word, with an irregular way to make plurals, past tenses, etc., is co-opted for another meaning, the usual treatment is to derive the different forms of the word using regular rules. Another sports example is to “fly out.” Fly is a verb with an irregular past tense, “flew,” but when we take the word for a new context, we forget all that irregular stuff and treat it as a new word, and make its past tense behave normally: “flied out.”
Yeah, but if Armstrong and Aldrin had gone to the moon “For All Womankind”, it would have taken them ten times as long to pack!
Besides, they’d have kept asking “does this spacesuit make me look fat?”
d’oh! I suppose it’d make more sense if I mentioned the rest of the experiment, huh? They read these samples after all agreeing that He/Him/His/Mankind in documents was inclusive of women. Better?
A little, but I guess I was sort of assuming that, even though He/Him/His/Mankind don’t look like they should be inclusive of women, some of us have grown up with the understanding that they’re supposed to be read that way anyway. In contrast, She/Her/Hers/Womankind aren’t generally understood to be inclusive of men.
Of course, as I think about it, that’s probably what the experiment was trying to demonstrate to begin with, eh? Don’t mind me…
From a different viewpoint, there are nouns (like woman) and pronouns (she, her, hers) that refer solely to females, but there is no easy way to make clear that you are referring solely to males. It could always be understood as a reference to human beings in general.
Isn’t that an indication for discrimination against males? 
Not at all.
The way I learned to speak, there are three third person singular possessive pronouns: one when the person is female, one when it’s male, and the other when it’s not determined. Those pronouns are “her,” “his,” and “his,” respectively. It just so happens that we don’t have a separate word for the indeterminate case, and “his” serves double duty.
Now in your experiment, the subjects first all agreed on the rule that’s in common use. Then they were given a sample text, and most interpreted it according to the common usage, namely that when “her” was used, the person it refers to is definitely female. So what did this experiment prove exactly?
Er, no. The only thing this proved was that, having grown up reading “he” as an all-inclusive pronoun, the use of “she” came across as awkward.
Now, if you were to do the same experiment with females and get the exact opposite result (“she” inclusive, “he” not) you might have a point.
Another proposal I’ve seen is to use the speaker’s own gender, when gender is indeterminate. Or rather, I’ve never seen this proposed, but I have seen novels written using this convention, and once you get used to it, it seems quite natural.
Dahnlor, “it” is indeed the proper English pronoun for third person neuter, but that’s not what we’re looking for. “It” is properly used for something which does not have gender, not for something of whose gender we are merely unsure. What we’re looking for is a third person indeterminate.
I saw another flyer from school. The spanish part had “chico/chica” for child about ten times. So political correctness is seeping into spanish too!
Hey, wait a minute! Woman get their own exclusive pronouns! That’s not fair! Where can I sue? 
er sounds too much like “her” for my taste!
I’ve long been a proponent of a set of gender-neutral pronouns for English. When the Web came along, I hoped for a bit that it might actually happen, but alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here’s an interesting site promoting GNPs: GNP FAQ.
The problem seems to be that no one can think of a pronoun set that people like. E/eir, zie/zir, hir/hir are the ones I’ve seen most. However, my family and I came up with a new set the other night, so y’all are privy to its internet debut. It’s a bit USA-centric, but I think we can overcome that with a little effort.
he, she, it, pat
him, her, it, pat
his,hers,its,pats
himself, herself, itself, patself
Whatdya think?
They can’t take peanut butter to school anymore due to increasingly high rates of severe peanut allergies.
The problem is that in the past that usage has been used to exclude women, even if it’s supposed to be inclusive.