Gender-specific pronoun

The gender-specific pronouns of the English language are the eight third person singular personal pronouns: he, she, him, her, his, hers, himself and herself. All other English pronouns and all English articles are ungendered. This makes English different from languages that have grammatical gender.

All eight pronouns have been also used in a gender-neutral sense: see "generic usage" below. They decline as follows:

	Subject	Object	Possessive Adjective	Possessive Pronoun	Reflexive
Male	He laughed	I hit him	His face bled	I am his	He shaves himself
Female	She laughed	I hit her	Her face bled	I am hers	She shaves herself

The advantage of having separate pronouns for men, women, and inanimate objects is in sentences like the following: 'John loved Mary's dog. He had given it to her a year ago'. This is somewhat arbitrary: one could imagine race-specific or age-specific pronouns for the same purpose, but no need for these is felt. The disadvantage is that gender has to be taken into account in sentences semantically unrelated to gender, see also below.

Ships and Countries

Traditionally ships have been referred to using the feminine pronouns, as well as countries and oceans. The origins of this practice are now unknown, and it is currently in decline.

In March 2002 The British newspaper Lloyds List announced that it would start referring to all vessels as 'it', but subsequently reversed its decision after receiving letters of protest.

Generic Usage

Usage of him and his to refer to a generic member of a mixed sex group was prescribed by manuals of style and school textbooks from the early 19th century until around the 1960s. It was called 'generic' or 'universal'

The customer brought his purchases to the cashier for checkout.
In a supermarket, everyone can buy anything he needs.
When a customer argues, always agree with him.

Gender-specific pronouns are also sometimes used when most members of some group are the same gender, with a small number of members of the opposite gender.

A secretary should keep her temper in check.
A boss should respect and listen to his employees.
Every hairdresser has her own style.
A junior doctor is at the bottom of his profession.

Compare the word man when used refer to humans in general.

All men are created equal.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Man cannot live by bread alone.

Some people feel that this can cause a variety of problems. In particular, many feminists feel that the male pronouns imply a masculine referent, which they argue would tend to exclude women unfairly (see sexism, non-sexist language).

It is not unheard of for governments, clubs and other groups to reinterpret sentences like 'every member must take off his shoes before entering the chapel' to mean that therefore female members may not enter the chapel. In 1984 the Minnesota State Legislature ordered that all gender-specific language be removed from the state laws. After two years of work, the rewritten laws were adopted. Only 301 of 20,000 pronouns were feminine. "His" was changed 10,000 times and "he" was changed 6,000 times.

Recently, some people also use female pronouns in a generic sense, to draw attention to feminist issues. Some authors recommend alternating between the use of the generic male and the generic female, perhaps on a per-chapter basis.

Some people use compound forms to emphasize the possibility of the referent having either sex: such as he or she, him or her, his or her or himself or herself. Any of these forms could be reversed, so as not to imply that males had priority: she or he, her or him, her or his or herself or himself. There are also abbreviated forms, such as s/he and him/herself. These forms can seem clumsy, and a few transgendered people object to the assumption that they must be either male or female, and cannot be both, a mixture, or neither.