No, I understood your point. I think you missed mine though - my point is that you have a limited amount of time each day to direct your attention. If you want to be more successful, or want women to be more successful, then focusing on he/she pronouns is a very bad use of your time. Focusing on creating wealth, learning management, networking, investing, saving, become more disciplined, fit, healthy, exercising are all good uses of time.

After the majority of women are well-informed and well-educated on the topics of nutrition/fitness, finance, investing, negotiation, accounting, self-discipline, goal setting, etc, etc, etc. - after all that's done then let's turn our attention to pronouns. In the meantime, it's rather like stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. Learning more personal finance, investing, and negotiation will massively help anyone's career success, including women. Having everyone switch to singular they will not make so big of a difference.

> Casual minor acts of racism probably have very little effect on Michael Jordan.

I'm getting better at predicting what people's responses to my comments will be - I knew someone would play the racism card. Well done. Comparing the historical use of "he" in English for a singular pronoun to racism smacks of really missing the point though - the point is, pronoun usage is going to have a trivial impact, if any, on people's successes. There's much better places to deploy your energy and resources if you want women to be more successful, either individually or as a group.

A Person Paper on Purity in Language by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter)

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

Incredibly well crafted satire.

"Most of the clamor,as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on. The negrists claim that using the word "white," either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute "person" everywhere where "white" now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as "All whites are created equal." Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say "All persons are created equal," or "All whites and blacks are created equal." Besides, as any schoolwhitey can tell you, such phrases are redundant. In most contexts, it is self-evident when "white" is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins."

Because the people who 'do care' as you put it, try to 'improve' by imposing a cost on others, namely by polluting every discussion to the point where the actual points get snowed under and this he/she non-issue takes over as the main focus (case in point: this discussion).

It's like Jehova's witnesses or other nutcase religious people: 'oh we're not harming anyone!' - not putting a gun to my head, no, but still ringing my door bell, proposing legislation based around your idiotic beliefs, etc. Get lost with your 'trying to save my soul' and if you really can't contain your beliefs and have to somehow involve others, at least pick people who have expressed an interest (i.e., post on alt.philosophy.feminism or whatever) instead of always imposing your 'debate' on everybody.