I get a lot of fictional mail from fictional readers of this site, who say to me "Stephen, you fancy yourself as a progressive lefty of some sort, and yet you persist in using non-gender-inclusive pronoun forms in your writing, thus perpetuating the age-old patriarchal oppression of 50% of the human population. Isn't that a little hypocritical?" And to that charge, I must plead guilty. But please allow me to say a few words in my defence.
I'll begin by explaining the problem. "Gender-neutral" language forms are required
Of course, I would claim that those who use "his" are not necessarily saying or implying any such thing. When I'm speaking of an arbitrary person, more often than not, I'm putting myself in that person's situation. And since I happen to be male, I talk about "him" and "his" situation. It would seem natural to me for a female referring to the same arbitrary person to talk about "her" and "her" situation. I am not consciously assuming that males are the default and females the exception. Maybe you could claim I'm unconsciously assuming that, but then you'd be delving into Freudian territory, which is to say, into complete bullshit.
In addition, I must say that I find single, decisive, fearless, gendered pronouns more aesthetically pleasing. "To each his own" (or "to each her own") I find far better than "to each his or her own" (which is cumbersome) and "to each their own" (where the number disagrees), and far, far better than some retchworthy neologism like "to each eir own", which instantly marks out its speaker as a member of one of the more ludicrous identity-political cults. I would say the same for the use of other gendered nouns in gender-neutral settings. There are times, for example, when the word "man" -- what a piece of work is man! -- has a straight-up Saxon directness and simplicity lacking in "person", "humanity", "humankind", "the human race" or any of its other synonyms and euphemisms.
In the present climate, such gendered forms can have quite a shocking appearance -- so shocking that the more timid writers avoid them even when they should be used. People have become so uneasy about using gendered terms that they produce nonsense like the following:
Yesterday I met a 20-year-old who said that they didn't remember the 80s....Here, the "20-year-old" is not an arbitrary person, not an idealised, abstracted 20-year-old, but a real person the writer spoke to the day before. This 20-year-old was presumably not a person of unknown sex, but a person with testicles or ovaries and the attendant external phenotypic characteristics. In short, the writer knows the sex of the 20-year-old, and should refer to him or her as "he" or "she", and has no excuse not to. Using "they" is not just a number violation, but a violation of pragmatics. The sex of the 20-year-old happens to be irrelevant, but in leaving it out, the writer communicates some unintended and distracting information. The reader is left wondering why the sex is being obscured. Was the writer talking to a genuinely androgynous person? Does the writer think that mentioning a person's sex is sexist? Is the writer just applying "no gendered pronouns" as a blanket rule? Whatever the reason, in purposefully concealing the sex of the 20-year-old, the writer gives an impression of coyness, hesitancy, over-politeness, timidity -- in short, a bad impression.
Those who object to the use of masculine forms in gender-neutral settings argue that it both reflects and contributes to the prejudices in our society. This argument is essentially the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that our thought patterns (and by extension, society) are dictated by the language we use. The strong form of this hypothesis was mostly the work of the amateur linguist Benjamin Whorf, a mystic with strong anti-rationalist leanings, who decided that the Western materialist worldview was the result of contamination with Indo-European tongues. To this end, he concocted a pseudoscientific fantasy world, based on dubious research into supposedly superior Native American peoples and their languages.
Unlike many other crackpot claims, though, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is to some extent empirically testable. And while the strong form of the hypothesis, along with much of Whorf's research, is now discredited, a weaker form -- that language has some influence on thought and perception -- has not been ruled out experimentally. There even seems to be some experimental evidence that the vocabulary used for colours has an impact on colour perception. But little empirical study has been done on the gender-neutral language question.
Certainly the strong form of the gender-neutral language claim -- that language determines the state of sexual equality in a society -- can be easily ruled out. No sane person would claim that China (Chinese has no gendered pronouns) or Iran or Afghanistan (Persian has no gendered nouns at all) are particularly gender-inclusive societies. I suppose a better test might be to look at the impact of language in societies where most other things are equal. Finno-Ugric languages have no gendered pronouns: Did Soviet-era Hungary have more sexual equality than her Eastern Bloc neighbours? In bilingual Finland, do Finnish-speaking women have a better time of it than Swedish-speaking women? Maybe they do -- I haven't seen any figures. In any case, it would be hard to say that language was the determining factor either way. Hopefully some day a psychologist or linguist will come up with a controlled study of the question. Until then, most of this argument is just blather.
One thing is certain: in English, feminine forms are linguistically marked. The masculine is seen as the "ordinary" form, while the feminine form often has a special suffix (e.g. "actor" and "actress") and seems more specific (compare "The movie had good actors" with "The movie had good actresses"). But this markedness doesn't necessarily carry a value judgement. Many pairs of antonyms contain a marked member -- for example, "big" and "small" are antonyms, and "small" is the marked one of the pair. "How big is your house?" is a reasonably ordinary question, while "How small is your house?" seems to assume that the house is small to begin with. But while often it's better to be big ("My salary is bigger"), equally often it's better to be small ("My tumour is smaller"). The value judgement isn't inherent in the linguistic construct. It comes from the context, it comes from society. It's certainly possible to imagine another society where the fact that feminine forms are marked actually conveys a preference for women: the distinguished sex, versus the less distinguished one. It would certainly be possible for feminist groups to "reclaim" the markedness of feminine forms, in much the same way that gay rights activists reclaimed "queer" as a positive epithet.
In any case, the relationship between language, thought and society is a complicated issue. Does language determine thought, or does thought determine language, or both, or neither? And to what extent? It's quite clear that simple linguistic determinism -- and the language use it inspires -- is not the answer, however appealing it may be for journalists, policy-makers, and easy-to-teach undergrad courses in the humanities. Rather than investigate the question experimentally, it's much easier for would-be progressive policy makers, left-liberals and the like to palm off some disadvantaged group with meaningless policy initiatives, like Ebonics or the compulsory use of gender-neutral language. Rather than do some constructive work to improve their lot, they give them mere words, with no further actions forthcoming.
This is another reason I don't use gender-neutral language: I do not want to associate myself with what might be called the "linguistic left". This trend (and yes, here we come to the obligatory socialist paragraph, which you may skip if you have read before) is the result of the sad trajectory of the post-1960s left into single-issue politics, identity politics, and postures of varying ridiculousness that do nothing to upset the real power structures in place. Unless real evidence is presented to the contrary, one can only conclude that linguistic concerns, such the choice of pronoun to use in a gender-neutral setting, are a diversion from the real issues facing disadvantaged people today. And one of the reasons the political left has become so impotent and uninspiring -- especially in the United States -- is its obsession with such trivialities.