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Comment by papercrane | Hacker News Reader

Sentence could have been made gender neutral pretty easily:

> Imagine your first day at a new job, and the programmer next to you straps themselves into a replica of an F-16 cockpit to get their work done.

I do feel that using a gender does make it read better though.

You may just be falling for confirmation bias. Anyone out there want to take a random sampling of these types of sentences and see if there actually is a gender bias?

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Except that technically "their work done" is improper grammar when your subject ("the programmer") is singular.

Are you sure? Because people use 'their' as a singular all the time when talking about someone of an unspecified gender, and the dictionary seems to agree with that:

"belonging to or associated with a person of unspecified sex: she heard someone blow their nose loudly"

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/their?q=the...

At the end of the day grammar is convention, and 'singular they' seems like a sensible one. (in part as it's got a long history, in part as I don't know a better alternative)

Perhaps I am. Given the prevalence of males in our industry, maybe every "she" just sticks out more than it should.

I'd actually be interested to see if there is a prevalence to use one gender over another for imaginary people. Not sure what it would mean, but it'd be interesting. Even more interesting if there was comparable data for people in other industries.

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