Bleh. Using she clearly isn't neutral. Unless we are going for "boo boys, yay girls" vibe, which is dull. Also is ze really that much of a straw man considering I've seen luke and others use it here? "They" seems appropriate, but LWers are nerds, they have far too little common sense for that. You know that two times out of three if they can be geeks about being "gender neutral" or some progressive silliness they will be. [...] The simple truth is that even if we go out of our way to endorse woman friendly norms, they simply won't be making up half the readership. When doing utility calculus, you need to stop thinking in "half of the intended readership" and just thinking about half the actual readership the thing can get. Lets not kid ourselves that the likely audience split will be 50-50, check out the numbers in the relevant academic philosophy departments or even on LessWrong I'm suggesting the radical notion that a female reader is as good as a male reader and no more. We ought to be maximizing the readership period, not worrying about its demographics except in a instrumental sense. Now obviously you don't want to signal that you aren't inclusive, that is the kind of thing an inbreed toothless bigoted redneck would do, so once someone brings it up you have to do something about it, but 9 times out of 10 that person bringing it up isn't doing the "audience maximisation" goal any good at all, especially once one factors in the opportunity costs of developer/administrator/writer time! LessWrong readers are capable of shutting up and calculating, deciding to punch their own father in the face and not talk to him for a year in order to get 500k that can save plenty of lives, but they aren't willing to give a rough look to people who suggest the building needs 500k in modifications to make it handicapped friendly. I smell a scared cow with some pseudo-utilitarian rationalization lipstick. If they where capable of doing so they would realize that often the disco

At least one man has concluded that defaulting to male third person pronouns made it more difficult for him to think clearly. The universal male pronoun contributes to availability bias.