- Women are underrepresented — in STEM fields at large and in the cryptocurrency space in particular — relative to a fairer world with less sexism, outmoded notions of gender roles, etc.
- This underrepresentation self-perpetuates partly because well-meaning men in these fields don't realize it's happening: it always feels better to believe a happier story about the world being more fair, and such men have less data about what keeps women out than they would have in a fairer world where women were more present to tell their stories.
- Erring on the side of feminine or gender-neutral pronouns — against this backdrop of under-representation — is a lightweight way to signal basic awareness of these issues and avoid the appearance of reinforcing them or believing they should be reinforced. As such, it informs my general model about the writer's thoughtfulness/sensitivity, which has some bearing on how compelling I find their argument to be.
It also bears noting that while I can mostly shrug and move on if a writer is implying apathy (or worse) about this issue, it is a more acute and even threatening signal for some women whose careers/lives have been damaged by these playing fields' having never been level, and it is morally fraught to participate in and benefit from discussions/community/resources that are effectively/unfairly off-limits to under-represented groups.
tl;dr:
- default-masculine-pronouns are not neutral,
- we've all been tacitly made to think that they are,
- some work to counter that makes sense, and
- it's good to push conversations/awareness about them because the default perpetuates them.
Avoiding Sexism in Legal Writing—The Pronoun Problem
https://lawyerist.com/49433/avoiding-sexism-in-legal-writing...
It has some solid advice, but it also notes that the use of "he" in sex-indeterminate situations was codified by Ann Fisher, "an 18th-Century schoolteacher and the first woman to write an English grammar book." Now, every time I see "he," I think of her.
