Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!agate!crm@cs.duke.edu
From: crm@cs.duke.edu (Charlie Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Language in a Requirements Specification
Message-ID: <12901@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 2 Aug 88 13:42:11 GMT
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	....
   Feminists have used she as the generic, to see if men would feel 
   included, and many did not.

Since there is no linguistic tradition of using she as a generic, there
had been no training in doing so, and I'm not surprised that men didn't.
I see a fair number of alternating he and she documents nowadays, and
find I'm no longer noticing -- I feel "included" by the she as well,
now.  (There's an old joke about being half woman on my mother's side
that I'll forbear....)

It would be a better experiment to arrange to have a collection of women
read manuals with the generic masculine pronoun and see if they felt
included.  By preference, this should be with a population of women that
hadn't already been corrupted by the Ms vs Miss and generic pronoun
debate; we just get in our Wayback machine with a stack of surveys...
where's that damned dog?

Anyway, here's was  Mary-Claire van Leunen says about the generic
pronoun:

	My expository style relies heavily on the exemplary singular,
	and the construction "everybody ... his" therefore comes up
	frequently.  This "his" is generic, not gendered.  "His or her"
	becomes clumsy with repetition and suggests that "his" alone
	elsewhere is masculine, which it isn't.  "Her" alone draws
	attention to itself and distracts from the topic at hand.
	"Their" solves the problem neatly but substitutes another.
	"Ter" is bolder than I am ready for.  "One's" defeats the
	purpose of the construction, which is meant to be vivid and
	particular.  "Its" is too harsh a joke.  Rather than play hob
	with the language, we feminists might adopt the position of
	pitying men for being forced to share their pronouns around.
			-- A Handbook for Scholars, pp 4--5.