Pronoun usage for a person of known gender in a group of mixed genders

Question

If a person of known gender is the first of many of mixed genders to do something, who does the pronoun point to in the following sentence:

Daisy was the first of the students to be handed [pronoun] diploma.

Answer 1

As a native English speaker, even if I very strongly suspect the gender of the person I would use the pronoun "their" in this case, it doesn't sound wrong to me in any context.

Daisy was the first of the students to be handed their diploma.

Steve was the first of the students to be handed their diploma.

Steve and Daisy were the first students to be handed their diplomas.

They all sound fine and aren't confusing.

Answer 2

A different twist on pronoun agreement.

By analogy with

• Daisy was the first girl to pick up her diploma.
• Daisy was the first girl to be handed her diploma.
• Daisy was the first to be handed her diploma.

and

• Daisy was the first of the girls to be handed her diploma.

I'd argue that the pronoun refers back to the first recipient rather than 'the girls', so 'her'.

Examples are not easy to find; this is one, assuming† not all three graduates were female:

It was the same year Una Bick ... enrolled with the first law students in the new TC Beirne School of Law. Two years later, in 1938, she became UQ’s first law graduate.

“Her name commenced with B, and only 3 graduated in that year,” her son, Roger, said.

“So, she was the first of the 3 to receive her degree.”

[University of Queensland: Contact Magazine]

† In 1938, the new Law School at the University of Queensland awarded its first Bachelor of Laws degrees.

There were only three students in the graduating class – Una Bick, Lex Dunn and Lionel Morrison.

[UQLA] confirms this.

Answer 3

Assuming that you wish to use gendered pronouns, the correct choice is "her", since Daisy is (presumably) female.

In particular, the passing mention of the other students doesn't affect the fact that the owner of the diploma, i.e. Daisy, is female, and thus should be referred to with a feminine personal pronoun. In other words, all these sentences are analogous:

"Daisy received her diploma."

"Daisy was handed her diploma."

"Daisy was the first to be handed her diploma."

"Daisy was the first of the students to be handed her diploma."

"Daisy was the first among the more than a hundred students present at the graduation ceremony that took place in the grand hall of the university main building on the fifth of June, ten days after the end of the spring semester, to be handed her diploma."

It doesn't matter how many extra details and digressions are inserted between the beginning and the end of the sentence. The diploma still belongs to Daisy, and thus is her diploma.

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That said, it is also possible to choose to use a gender-neutral personal pronoun such as singular "they" instead of a gendered pronoun.

A note of caution should be given, however. While historically such gender-neutral pronouns in English tended to be reserved for persons whose gender was unknown or indeterminate, with the push towards gender-neutral language in recent years it would not be altogether out of the question to use them even when referring to a person whose gender is known.

That said, some readers, especially among the older generations, may find such usage surprising and potentially jarring, and some style guides may advise against it or even declare it incorrect. Also, as the use of gender-neutral pronouns (and gender-neutral language in general) has sometimes been a politically hot topic lately, some people may associate with particular political and cultural views and may, if they happen to be opposed to those views, object to such usage on that basis.

Long story short, while the following sentence would be unlikely to surprise anyone nowadays:

"Each graduating student will be called to the podium, one at a time, where they will be handed their diploma."

some people might be surprised by the use of a gender-neutral pronoun in:

"Daisy was the first of the students to be handed their diploma."

The problem is not that the sentence above would be in any way ambiguous or difficult to understand — it isn't. However, some readers may find the use of "their" instead of "her" unfamiliar and unexpected in this context. Furthermore, some readers may perceive such usage as marked, either to suggest that Daisy identifies as (or is assumed to be) a non-gender-binary person, or possibly as a signal that the writer holds views on gender identity and equality that the reader does not share.

In my personal opinion (as someone whose native language never had such silly gendered pronouns in the first place!) that should not discourage you from using non-gendered pronouns in your writing if you find it more natural and convenient.

But you do (unfortunately) need to be aware of the controversy associated with such usage, and the risk that someone will write you a lengthy public letter accusing you of everything from corrupting the eternal beauty and perfection of the English language to pushing a devilish political conspiracy aimed at sexually perverting the minds of innocent children, all because you used "they" to refer to someone named "Daisy".

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Addendum: As noted in some of the comments and other answers, it would also be possible to parse the sentence:

"Daisy was the first of the students to be handed their diploma."

in such a way that "the students to be handed their diploma" is understood as the definition of a group of students, of which Daisy is the first. Under this interpretation, the pronoun "their" refers to "the students", who are plural, and thus is the only possible choice.

However, while this alternative interpretation avoids one problem (specifying who exactly "the students" are), it brings up two more in its place:

1. If this was the intended interpretation, it would seem more natural for the word "diploma" to be pluralized, since there presumably are as many distinct diplomas involves as there are students.

2. If the phrase "to be handed their diploma" is interpreted as defining the group of "the students" being referred to, that leaves nothing to define in what respect Daisy is the first among them.

Admittedly, neither of these problems is insurmountable. One could interpret "their diploma" as a distributive singular, and the context in which the sentence is used could supply some implicit definition of what it means for Daisy to be "first" among the group.

In particular, an (IMO) natural context for this sentence would be that of a graduation ceremony, where a group of graduating students are called up, one by one, to receive their diploma from some official. Notably, such a context (if correct) provides an implicit definition of both who "the students" are (namely those participating in the ceremony) and what it means to be "first" among them (as the students are called up to receive their diploma in a specific order).

In that context, the specific sentence:

"Daisy was the first of the students to be handed their diploma."

could be interpreted (more or less) equally well in both ways: either "their" is a gender-neutral singular pronoun referring to Daisy, and "to be handed their diploma" describes the manner in which Daisy is first among the students present, or "their" is plural pronoun referring to "the students", with the entire phrase serving to define the group of students as those "to be handed their [singular!] diploma."

Fortunately, in practice, this grammatical ambiguity is unlikely to create any factual ambiguity in this case. Regardless of how one parses the sentence, there is still a group of students, some or all whom are receiving their diploma(s), and Daisy is the first among them to do so.

Answer 4

The pronoun points to Daisy . . .

Daisy was the first of the students [at the ceremony] to be handed her diploma.

Of the students [at the ceremony], Daisy was the first to be handed her diploma.

Put another way . . .

Daisy was the first student [at the ceremony] to be handed her diploma.

Bob was the second to be handed his.

Or . . .

Daisy was handed her [Daisy’s] diploma.

Oops, Daisy was handed his [Bob’s] diploma.

Answer 5

The sentence in question states that a certain individual is the first member of a certain group. The individual is, of course, Daisy, and the group is:

the students [queuing] to be handed their diplomas.

The part of the sentence about handing the diplomas is the specification of the group in question. That part of the sentence is not about Daisy in particular; it is about a group of people. It is only because the sentence as a whole tells us that Daisy is a member of that group, that we can conclude that she will be handed her diploma. Because that part of the sentence is about a group of people, it needs their, notwithstanding that the rest of the sentence is about one person.

It is the OP's use of handed (rather than, say, awarded) that leads one to assume that diploma here stands for a paper-embodied document (rather than the academic qualification itself) and that the setting of the utterance is some sort of a ceremony where the students (or, more precisely, the graduands) are, in some order, given these documents. The sentence tells us that, in that order, Daisy was the first.

All this has nothing to do with the controversial issues about singular they/them/their. The their in this sentence is not singular their; it has students as its antecedent, which makes it a perfectly uncontroversial plural their.

The only reason why this answer may not have been immediately obvious is that the sentence, as formulated in the question, confusingly has diploma in the singular. The question does not make it clear why anybody would want to use the singular there.

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The above answer has made an assumption about the logical structure of the sentence, which was reasonable given that the sentence was presented in isolation. We can, however imagine a context in which the same sentence would have a different logical structure, and in which her (as well as the singular of diploma) would be appropriate. Consider:

Only 123 students enrolled in 2020. Daisy was the first of the students to be handed her diploma.

(I am assuming that by using a traditionally feminine name in the example, the OP intended us to think of Daisy as female.)

In this case, we would interpret the students to stand for the previously mentioned students, i.e. those who enrolled in 2020. The sentence in this context invites us to consider Daisy as a member of that group, and then tells us something about her, that she is to be handed her diploma. The part of these sentence about handing the diplomas is, in this case, not a specification of the group referred to by the students. Not all of the 123 students in that group are about to receive their diplomas yet: some of them may have dropped out, and some may be taking longer to complete their studies than Daisy, who worked specially hard. To read the sentence this way we, however, need a context that makes the students refer to a group different from the students to be handed their diplomas.

I suspect that the contributors to this page whose answers are based on treating Daisy as the antecedent of the sought pronoun have imagined some such context, despite the OP's not having provided it in in the question.

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While (as the other answers and comments on this page make clear), there may be some room for debate as to which of the above two readings of the sentence is more natural, one needs to be aware of both of them for there to even be a question here. If one were to simply assume that Daisy is the antecedent of the sought pronoun, it would be puzzling why the OP asked the question.