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NancyLebovitz comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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Could you use whether the minute on your clock is odd or even?
It still means I need to break my typing to look at an external stimulus. Honestly, so far I've not seen many instances where strict alternation worked badly, so I'm not motivated to solve this non-problem.
It would be better to flip a coin at the beginning of a document to determine which pronoun to use when the gender is unspecified. That way there is no potential for the reader to be confused by two different pronouns referring to the same abstract entity.
Or we could flip a coin once for all of the English-speaking world, so that we aren't confused when we go from one document to another. Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
I'd be very curious to see a study seeing if this did actually impact what gender people think of examples by default. Note that there have been studies showing that kids are more likely to think of a "fireman" as male than a "firefighter" and for similar roles, but I'm not aware of any such study for pronouns. I suspect you'd have the same result.
I'm not a statistically significant study, but given "The agent's husband stood up from the table," I would expect pretty much everyone to assume without much effort that the agent was female, but given "The agent led his husband onto the dance floor," I'd expect most people to become confused, and some to assume a gay male agent, and very few to assume a female agent.
That suggests that the "his" gets treated as evidence of the referent's masculinity strong enough to override a strong prior in the other direction.
My predisposition to assume that an agent is male is stronger than my predisposition to assume heteronormative relationships. My immediate reaction to the sentence, "The agent's husband stood up from the table" was to suppose a male agent with a male spouse. But I'm probably unusual in this regard.
I agree with your analysis but I'd like to see some form of formal study confirm it.
Why, on your view, would going from using "he" to refer to a hypothetical person in one document, to using "she" to refer to a different hypothetical person in a different document, be confusing?
(Not, mind you, that I intend to do this. I've been using the gender-neutral third-person plural pronoun consistently in these situations for years and see no reason to stop. )
Hypothetical people, or people of unknown gender, have no gender in reality I can refer to. If I have to treat them as gendered anyway, surely it is easier to have a default gender to fall back on, rather than having to keep track of the particular nonce gender of this particular hypothetical person/person of unknown gender.
Interesting.
For my part, if I'm being told a story about an actual person, whom I don't know, who is referred to as "him" or "her," I don't find it especially confusing to subsequently keep track of their gender.
Nor do I find it significantly more confusing if they are hypothetical instead of actual.
I hadn't previously realized there were people who differed from me in that regard. That's useful to know: thanks for clarifying.