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I suspect it's due to internationalization reasons. Even in English, we don't really have useful singular third-person gender-neutral pronouns (yes, I'm aware of "they", but it's actually a debated topic). In other languages where everything has genders, there might not be a reason to have gender neutral pronouns whatsoever.

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So what? Gender isn't relevant to every online activity.

A century ago we didn't have any gender neutral clothing, either: if we need better pronouns, then let's make some up.

>if we need better pronouns, then let's make some up.

For every language?

Perhaps Google finds asking users for their gender (which is highly correlated with your name, anyway) to be an easier task than introducing the necessary pronouns into every language in the globe.

What about languages that don't have gender neutral pronouns?

Google isn't (yet) using it for selecting pronouns and/or they don't seem to have a problem using "their" as a neutral pronoun: http://i.imgur.com/1B5rT.png

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