SHE - 21st Century's Common Pronoun

Common pronoun - what does it even mean? Well, it is the pronoun used commonly when describing humanity at large. For example, when I say that every employee must think of his company’s benefit, I am not saying that the employee has to be male. I used ‘his’ as a common pronoun.

These days whenever I read something particularly written by someone in the West I see that ‘she’ is being used as the common pronoun. Even a few years ago it was ‘he’ that was used as the common pronoun. This shift seemed interesting to me on many levels.

The first thought that occurred was probably the writer was a woman and so it seemed normal to her to use ‘she’. But that was not the case. It would appear that this is done by many authors both male and female.

I guess the world as a whole is beginning to see feminine behaviour as the gold standard. That explains the rise of the metrosexual man.

It could also mean that women have started seizing the power in society. We see as many women in offices as men today obviously. And given the fact that women shape and design the lives of the men in their lives, that just means women have more influence in the society at large, by the combination of their influence in offices along with homes.

It is also noticeable that women do a lot more work these days including dropping and picking up kids at school, shopping and of course earning money. So it is probably appropriate to have ‘she’ as the common pronoun.

Before someone starts attacking me for being a male chauvinistic pig, let me clarify that I am NOT saying this new semantics is wrong, it is just a curious observation I made recently and was just wondering what brought about this change.

Just a thought I had on my mind.