In well over 1400 daily posts on this blog, there are many such stories and I always use “they” as a generic pronoun.
Let me tell you a story about why I started this, then talk about why else it matters now more than ever before.
I am both open and confidential. I love to share what I learn with others, and at the same time being highly conscious at all times of the importance of confidentiality. Over the years I have shared relevant contextually altered stories from clients with others so they can take their own learnings. Of course, it has therefore always been vital that when I choose to do so, I do it in such a way that confidentiality is maintained.
One way to be sure of this is to be highly contextual in the story, another to change elements that don’t change the story but remove the chance of identifying the person or business being discussed, such as location, the industry of the business etc.
However, over many years of using these methods to openly share learnings while maintaining confidentiality, perhaps the single most powerful way to do this is to use “they” consistently as the pronoun identifying an individual.
One reason this has worked really well for me is that gender bias is so deeply ingrained in society. Let me explain. Over my decade and more of coaching, the majority of my clients have been women leaders. When sharing learnings from my work contextually and anonymously, the simple act of using “they” rather than “she” was often the single most powerful way to guarantee I had fully anonymised the story, as people would automatically assume the business leader I was talking about was a man.
This happened repeatedly and it took me a while to not give myself away with a smile when the person I was talking to would, after hearing a story, then ask a question that began with a gendered pronoun, as almost always they used “he”, rather than “they”. What is worse (in terms of societal bias) was that this happened, even more, when I was telling a story to a woman than a man. That element also saddened me further, that women would assume that the individual whose experience and story I was sharing.
So, I started using “they” in order to maintain confidentiality and also to reduce bias in the listener around how they saw gender in business and leadership. In 2021, however, we are, thankfully, more and more aware as a society that is important to respect those who choose not to identify as “he” or “she” through the use of gender neutral pronouns, so this is also a social statement.
In closing, though, this is not new. The novelist Ursula Le Guin has led on this us of they as their generic pronoun for years, as they noted in this quote:
Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he.
Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”
This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.)
The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.”
My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.”
Ursula Le Guin, from “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, published 2015