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Possible Duplicate:
Gender neutral pronoun

Very often, I find myself writing about a user, an anonymous person whose gender I don't know.

Right after mentioning this abstract user, I need to make a reference to the said person, and I often end up using he/she, as a shorter version of he or she.

Example:

Note that the user may get confused by the fact that green button turns red when he/she presses the blue button.

And then I need to make another reference in another sentence right after that, and I find it heavy to write he/she again... So I write he.

I am confused by this because in French, every single noun has a gender. We don't have any neuter. Utilisateur, which means user in French, is masculine. Whereas personne is feminine.

So I don't have this problem in French. If I talk about a user then I can say he. If I talk about a person, I say she.

But how to deal properly and elegantly with this situation in English?

Is it acceptable to say he, as when one says man while talking about both men and women in general?

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olivierg
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  • @MrHen: thanks for this pointer! But I think that you should mention this link in an answer to my question, as it may well be the right one. – olivierg May 10 '11 at 21:20
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    Actually, we'll probably go ahead and close this question to keep all the answers in the same place. We're waiting for a few other opinions from users just to make sure. – MrHen May 10 '11 at 21:25
  • @MrHen: ok, I hope that my question will still be useful to some people searching for this topic. – olivierg May 10 '11 at 21:36
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    Probably. That is why we close and forward instead of deleting it. :) – MrHen May 10 '11 at 21:37
  • @MrHen: That's nice :) And thanks for the pointer, it contains great and interesting answers! – olivierg May 10 '11 at 21:43

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