Why the generic “he” is not neutral
English has no gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun built into its oldest grammar rules, so for a long stretch “he” filled that role by convention: “a user should check his settings,” “every developer knows his tools.” The convention wasn’t neutral even when it was standard — it just felt neutral to whoever didn’t have to notice it. Job titles built on “-man” have the same shape: “chairman,” “spokesman,” “salesman” all quietly encode “this role is held by a man” into the name of the role itself, whether or not that was ever true of the person doing it.
None of this requires assuming bad intent from anyone who ever wrote “he” as a generic pronoun or “chairman” as a job title. It requires noticing that the language carries an assumption most writers never chose to make, and that better options have existed — and been standard — for a long time now.
What replaced the generic “he”
Three replacements do nearly all the work, and none of them are new.
Singular “they.” The oldest and least controversial fix, grammatically speaking — English speakers have used “they” for an unspecified singular person for centuries, well before “he” was prescribed as the “correct” generic by 18th-century grammarians. What’s changed recently is that the major style guides caught up to how people already talk: the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook both endorsed it within the last decade, and the American Psychological Association made it the default in APA style in 2019. “He/she” and “s/he” were themselves an earlier attempt at the same fix — an improvement on bare “he,” but clunky enough on the page that “they” has mostly replaced them too.
Gender-neutral job titles. “Chair” or “chairperson” instead of “chairman.” “Police officer” instead of “policeman.” “Flight attendant” instead of “stewardess.” Most of these changes happened at the level of the profession itself, not in a style guide — police departments, airlines, and fire departments changed their own job titles decades ago, in some cases before most style guides caught up. Writing “policeman” today isn’t using insider jargon; it’s using an ex-official term the institution itself replaced.
“Guys,” “manpower,” and casual defaults. These are softer cases — nobody standardized a replacement the way grammar bodies standardized “they,” so the fix here is closer to “notice the default and pick a word that doesn’t carry one” than “adopt the officially correct term.” “Folks,” “everyone,” or “team” instead of “guys.” “Workforce” or “staff” instead of “manpower.” “Person-hours” instead of “man-hours.” None of these are mandated by a standards body; they’re just as clear and don’t default to male.
Where this needs a caveat, not a rule
A wordlist genuinely cannot tell whether “guys” is addressing a mixed group or a room that happens to be entirely men — both are common, and only one of them is the pattern this article is about. The honest response isn’t to stay silent on “guys” entirely (it’s still worth a second look most of the time it appears in professional writing), and it isn’t to flag it with the same confidence as a truly unambiguous case like “chairman.” It’s to flag it and say so: the inclusive language checker attaches an explicit caveat to exactly this kind of entry, because pretending to a certainty the tool doesn’t have is worse than admitting the limit.
The same caution applies to “master’s degree” and “master branch” — neither has anything to do with the master/slave terminology pair this pattern is often lumped in with, which is why a good checker treats “master” on its own as off-limits and only flags the actual compound term. Getting this distinction wrong is the single fastest way a tool like this loses credibility; see inclusive language in technical writing for the broader version of that argument, including where it applies to non-gendered terms too.
Don’t overcorrect into a different problem
Fixing a gendered default is not the same project as scrubbing every trace of gender from a document, and treating it that way tends to produce writing that sounds anxious instead of clear. If a document is specifically about a named person and that person uses “she,” write “she.” If a case study describes a real team that happens to be all women, “the women on the team” isn’t the problem this article is about — it’s an accurate description. The pattern worth fixing is the default: reaching for a gendered word when no gender is actually known or relevant, not the use of a gendered word when it’s simply true.
This distinction matters because overcorrection has a real cost: readers notice when phrasing feels forced, and that notice pulls attention away from the actual content. A document that visibly strains to avoid “he” in every sentence reads as self-conscious in a way that undermines the goal. The better target is a document where gender simply doesn’t come up unless it’s relevant — not one where the writer’s effort to avoid it becomes its own kind of distraction. Singular “they” helps here precisely because it’s now common enough to read as unremarkable rather than like a workaround.
A quick gut check before publishing
A fast way to audit a finished draft: search for “he,” “his,” and “him” used generically, and check whether each one refers to someone specific or stands in for “any user, any developer, any reader.” Only the second case needs a change. Do the same with job titles ending in “-man” — most swap cleanly for a gender-neutral version without changing the sentence’s meaning at all, which is usually a good sign that the original word wasn’t doing any real work beyond habit. If a swap does change the meaning or the rhythm of the sentence, that’s worth noticing too; it usually means the gendered version was carrying more weight than expected, and the replacement needs a slightly different sentence around it rather than a pure word swap.
Check your own writing
Run a document through the inclusive language checker to see gendered defaults — along with technical terms, ableist idioms, and loaded framing — flagged with the specific alternative and the reasoning behind it. Every finding there is a suggestion, not a verdict; the caveats are part of the output, not an afterthought.