Word: genderism
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Once upon a time, women weren't allowed in Lamont and Neil Armstrong could take a step for Man and leap for Mankind without fretting too much over whether his statement was gender-neutral. In those days, a student sat at his desk to write his paper on the history of mankind. A few weeks after he handed in the paper, this student's professor said to his class, "If anyone wants to, he can pick up his paper after the lecture." The student received his paper, was satisfied with a Gentleman's "C" and went to a Final Club...
Today, we happily live in a society where most people consider "he" and "she" to be equal--as people, at least. As a pronoun, however, "she" still hits the grammatical glass ceiling while "he" runs rampant, masquerading as a "gender-unspecific pronoun" that represents both men and women. But the supposition that "he" or "his" may refer to both sexes is ludicrous, since study after study has shown that people of both sexes take this pronoun to refer exclusively to a male. The elusive "gender unspecific pronoun" represents a gap between the rules of grammar and the rules of society...
Linguists have offered other solutions. The most common alternative--which has become acceptable in everyday speech despite its grammatical incorrectness--is to follow the gender-unspecific subject with the plural "they" ("If anyone wants to, they can pick up their paper..."). This construction may not sound too bad when spoken, but it doesn't look too good on paper. Another possibility is the hybrid "s/he." However, whereas "they" seems awkward on paper, "s/he" is awfully hard to pronounce in everyday speech. A few years ago, Expos instructor Nathaniel Lewis came up with a novel solution to the pronoun problem when...
Speaking of womyn, I have not forgotten another option: using "she" and "her" exclusively for all gender-unspecific pronouns. This construction sticks out just as much as, if not more than, the repeated use of "he." But that may be the point. People should call attention to the fact that English is sexist. The language provides dozens of negative words for a sexually active female (slut, ho, harlot) and not one for a male (stud?). It refers to groups as "you guys" when no men are present. It calls someone who presides and perfects a "master," while a "mistress" wallows...
...Otherwise, people will consider linguistic alterations a laughable outgrowth of political correctness, forced upon them by an overly sensitive establishment. Society will remain just as frustrated if political correctness leads only to the switching of a few pronouns, and not to thinking deeply about the real nature of gender and gender equality...