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"he" "he/she" "she/he" "s/he" "e" etc. WAS: female Nobel laureates

Matt Kuss wrote:
> >> is largely irrelevant - it's the process that matters.  When you've heard
> >> more than one Nobel laureate stumble and mutter his [sic] way through an
> >> hour-long seminar, losing half his [sic] audience in the process, the importance
> >> of debate experience (or I.E.) becomes painfully obvious.
> 
> While I understand your point, we are taught early in schooling that when
> referring to someone much as Mr. Dove did, and the sex is unknown or
> unimportant, you must pick he or she and stick with it.

This training is in large part reversing itself. Some style guides now
look with disfavor upon male pronouns being used to refer to nonmale or
nonspecific groups. Likewise, I think that the current academic
convention in texts and the journals is moving away from this antiquated
idea that when one refers to humans it should be in the sense of the
male.

> There is no gender
> neutral pronoun to use, and he/she is excessive and it is not supposed to be
> used.

I think there is little reason not to use s/he or she/he. These terms
both (in my opinion, and in some empirical research) connote a sex
ambiguity or mixed sex. "He/she" is better than "he" but still often
connotes male dominated or exclusively male groups, especially where
common sex stereotyping would support the connotation. One may think
that these options are "excessive" or "cumbersome" but whatever
stylistic ease one might lose in adjusting to their pronoun use is
certainly made up for by what s/he unloads in terms of ideological
encumberances.
 
> Independently, I personally know people (no one reading this list) that
> would be offended if "she"had been used because it would seem that it is
> being implied that women are the ones with poor organizational speaking skills.

Again, a reason to prefer s/he or she/he. I would go so far as to
suggest that we note when people we quote use a sex-specific pronoun (he
or she) to denote a mixed sex or sex ambiguous set with [sic], as I've
done in my quote of the original above.

> I guess the plural could have been used to avoid this altogether.

I don't like this option, though it might be superior to the antiquated
form. There are two reasons this is troubling. First, it probably would
fail to overcome the tendency for terms such as "he," and even "he/she,"
to be read in congruence with classical sex stereotyping, even if
unreflectively. Second, the mixing of the singular "A nobel prize
winner" with the plural "they" would seem to make the text even more
difficult to read and make any sense of than inventing a term, such as
"e."

Anyway, I would hope the original author and Matt Kuss do not take this
as castigation. I am making an _effort_ to be increasingly aware of my
language use (though this is a constant struggle for me) and find my
small successes very satisfying.

Pat Gehrke
CSU Chico
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