In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific.
"[5] That masculine forms are used to represent all human beings is in accord with the traditional gender hierarchy, which grants men more power and higher social status than women.
[7] The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing says that the words children hear affect their perceptions of the gender-appropriateness of certain careers (e.g. firemen vs firefighters).
[8] Men and women apply for jobs in more equal proportions when gender-neutral language is used in the advertisement, as opposed to the generic he or man.
[11] Opponents of gender-neutral language often argue that its proponents are impinging on the right of free expression and promoting censorship, as well as being overly accommodating to the sensitivities of a minority.
When the Reverend Samuel May "moved that Mrs Stephen Smith be placed on a Committee" of the National Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, Lucretia Mott quickly replied: "Woman's Rights' women do not like to be called by their husbands' names, but by their own".
Examples include firefighter instead of fireman; flight attendant instead of steward or stewardess; bartender instead of barman or barmaid; and chairperson or chair instead of chairman or chairwoman.
In such cases, proponents of gender-neutral language generally advocate the non-use of the distinct female form (always using comedian rather than comedienne, for example, even if the referent is known to be a woman).
"[25] By the 18th century, man had come to refer primarily to males; some writers who wished to use the term in the older sense deemed it necessary to spell out their meaning.
Anthony Trollope, for example, writes of "the infinite simplicity and silliness of mankind and womankind",[26] and when "Edmund Burke, writing of the French Revolution, used men in the old, inclusive way, he took pains to spell out his meaning: 'Such a deplorable havoc is made in the minds of men (both sexes) in France....'"[25] Proponents of gender-neutral language argue that seemingly generic uses of the word "man" are often not in fact generic.
[27] Writing for the American Philosophical Association, Virginia L. Warren follows Janice Moulton and suggests truly generic uses of the word man would be perceived as "false, funny, or insulting", offering as an example the sentence "Some men are female.
In a time when women, having no vote, could neither give nor withhold consent, Jefferson had to be using the word men in its principal sense of males, and it probably never occurred to him that anyone would think otherwise.
[8] Another target of frequent criticism by proponents of gender-neutral language is the use of the masculine pronoun he (and its derived forms him, his and himself) to refer to antecedents of indeterminate gender.
[36] Linguist Steven Pinker goes further and argues that traditional grammar proscriptions regarding the use of singular "they" are themselves incorrect: The logical point that you, Holden Caulfield, and everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasp is that everyone and they are not an "antecedent" and a "pronoun" referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number.
The "X" does not refer to any particular person or group of people; it is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships.
[49] In 2015, recognition spread more broadly across UK institutions, including the Royal Mail, government agencies responsible for documents such as drivers' licenses, and several other major banks.
[51] Many editing houses, corporations, and government bodies have official policies in favor of in-house use of gender-neutral language.
One of the first was The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing: For writers, editors, and speakers, published in 1980; linguist Deborah Cameron argues that the work by Casey Miller and Kate Swift brought "the issue of sexist language into the mainstream".
[33] Employee policy manuals sometimes include strongly worded statements prescribing avoidance of language that potentially could be considered discriminatory.