No Job for a Woman? Mind your Language!

Question:  Is there anything wrong with the following sentences?

1. It's important for a doctor to be good at listening to his patients.
2. Sometimes a manager needs to make decisions that will be unpopular with his staff.
3. A nurse knows that she has a lot of responsibility for her patients' welfare.
4. If someone wants to become a scientist, he needs to study hard at school.

Answer:  It depends what you mean by 'wrong'.  Grammatically, they're all fine.  However, to many English-speakers, there's something just a bit... uncomfortable... about them.

Simply put: why are the doctor, the manager and the scientist automatically men, while the nurse is a woman?  Aren't women doctors too?  And men nurses?  In English it's now customary to include both genders in statements like these - it's polite, even!



There are two main ways of making these sentences 'gender-neutral':

1.  Use both male and female pronouns.

1. It's important for a doctor to be good at listening to his or her patients.
2. Sometimes a manager needs to make decisions that will be unpopular with his or her staff.
3. A nurse knows that he or she has a lot of responsibility for his or her patients' welfare.
4. If someone wants to become a scientist, he or she needs to study hard at school.  OR If someone wants to become a scientist, s/he needs to study hard at school.

This is very easy to do, and is acceptable in most situations, although s/he is only used for writing.   The one drawback is that it takes longer to say 3 syllables than it does to say 1, which leads us to the second method:

2.  Use 'they' as an alternative third-person singular pronoun.

1. It's important for a doctor to be good at listening to their patients.
2. Sometimes a manager needs to make decisions that will be unpopular with their staff.
3. A nurse knows that they have a lot of responsibility for their patients' welfare.
4. If someone wants to become a scientist, they need to study hard at school.

This looks really weird if you're not used to it - you use 'they', 'them' or 'their', but you are referring to one individual, as the rest of the sentence makes clear.  Also, if singular 'they' is the subject of a verb in the present simple, you need to use a plural verb - 'they have' instead of 'he or she has'.

Using 'they' like this may or may not be acceptable in written English, depending on what you're writing and who's going to read it (it's probably best avoided in academic writing unless an institution specifically permits it, for example).  However, it's extremely popular, especially in spoken English, simply because it's quicker to say than 'he or she'.



Photos taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @dfogarty @eannaegrenoble, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/