I sometimes use that, but it feels awkward to me when referring to a specific person. And in this case, I think that at one point I was using "they" to refer to the employees, and didn't want the ambiguity.

(I'll note that I've had this discussion multiple times before. I'm fine with people expressing disapproval of my choice, but please assume that I'm not making it out of ignorance.)

'They' can be confused with a plural pronoun and a lot of people feel it's grammatically incorrect to use it to refer to a singular person.

The problem with gender-neutral singular pronouns is that there are many of them originating from different contexts. Each group or person tries to get their pronoun - ve, ze, co - adopted as standard but it's difficult because they're invented, so nobody knows about them, so you have to have this discussion every time you use one.

I'm friends with an asexual person who doesn't identify as male or female, and ze asked me to use the "ze" pronoun when referring to zer. I do in zer presence but there's no way I'm going to drop a sentence like that when somebody asks what I did yesterday. I just want to continue the conversation rather than have an involved discussion about gender norms.

But this way you get to flag yourself as an SJW.

I meant Greg Egan.