Sexist Pronouns

English has three third-person singular pronouns: he, she, and it, for men, women, and things respectively. Well into the twentieth century, writers used he as a “generic” pronoun. That is they used he to refer to an individual of unspecified gender — like anyone, somebody, everyone, the reader, a parent, the average voter, and so on.

If anyone buys his essay on the internet, he will fail the class.

Today, many readers find the use of he as a generic pronoun unacceptable because it excludes reference to women. Even if you don’t find the generic he offensive or jarring, many of your readers will. So using it can undermine your ethos, making you sound thoughtless and chauvinistic.

How do you avoid the generic pronoun he (or him, or his, for that matter)? You have several options.

Double Pronouns

If anyone buys his or her essay on the internet, he or she will fail the class.

Using both masculine and feminine pronouns (his or her, he or she) is more inclusive, but it’s also clumsy, wordy, graceless prose. And double pronouns get clumsier and wordier and more graceless the more often you use them:

Everyone must write his or her name in his or her textbook so his or her instructor can identify his or her textbook if he or she loses it.

A journalist can’t be so shy that he or she can’t bring himself or herself to go up to a stranger he or she sees and ask him or her to give him or her his or her opinion.

An occasional double pronoun might work fine. But if you use them too often, they will clog up your prose and annoy your readers.

Alternating Pronouns

If anyone buys her essay on the internet, she will fail the class.

Anybody who gets his friend to write his essay for him will also fail.

Some writers switch back and forth between she and he, alternating between them every other sentence, or paragraph, or page, or chapter. Alternating pronouns leaves each individual sentence potentially offensive, since using she as a generic pronoun is just as sexist as using he, but in theory the work as a whole is appropriately even-handed. In practice, this technique is often confusing and always distracting.

Plural Subjects

If students buy their essays on the internet, they will fail the class.

Changing the singular “anyone” to the plural “students” allows you to use the plural pronouns “their” and “they.” In most cases, a plural subject solves the pronoun problem, but sometimes it distorts your meaning.

Consider the sentence: “A single student who plagiarizes his paper disgraces his university.” If you changed it to, “Students who plagiarize their papers disgrace their universities,” you would lose the idea that just one student’s plagiarism dishonors the university. But as long as it doesn’t twist your meaning, changing to a plural subject neatly sidesteps the whole issue of sexist pronouns.

Singular They

If anyone buys their essay on the internet, they will fail the class.

Employing they (and them, their, themselves, and so on) as a singular gender-neutral pronoun is common in everyday speech and informal writing, and many authorities — including The Chicago Manual of Style, Garner’s Modern American Usage, The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, and the Oxford English Dictionary — endorse using singular they in formal writing as well.

Other authorities, however, disagree. The MLA Handbook, for example, says: “They, them, their, and theirs cannot logically be applied to a single person” (§1.10). Logical or not, competent authors of English do, in fact, use they as a singular pronoun and always have (see below).

While there’s no single cure-all for sexist pronouns, if you use plural subjects or the singular they — depending on which works better in a given context — you should be able to make your prose sound both fair-minded and graceful.