Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns

A gender-specific pronoun is a pronoun associated with a particular grammatical gender, such as masculine, feminine, or neuter, or with a social gender (or sex), such as female or male. Examples include the English third-person personal pronouns he and she.

A gender-neutral pronoun, by contrast, is a pronoun that is not associated with a particular grammatical or social gender and that does not imply, for instance, male or female. Many English pronouns are gender-neutral, including they (which in certain contexts can also refer to a singular antecedent such as everyone, a person, or the patient).

Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. Others, however – particularly those that have a system of grammatical gender (or have historically had such a system, as with English) – have gender specificity in certain of their pronouns, particularly third-person personal pronouns.

Problems of usage arise in languages such as English, in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown sex or social gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns (he or she) are gender-specific. In such cases a gender-specific, usually masculine, pronoun is sometimes used with intended gender-neutral meaning; such use of he was also common in English until the latter half of the 20th century but is now controversial. Use of singular they is another common alternative but is not accepted by everybody. Some attempts have been made, by proponents of gender-neutral language, to introduce invented gender-neutral pronouns.