Thank you. I noticed this a lot on HN, but I don't know how to react. There is a common presumption that co-workers and managers will be men. It bothers me. I work in Asia where there are lots of talented women engineers. Each time I read one of those sentences, I do a double take!
I'm pretty sure most people over ~30 in the US were taught that was the correct form. Common usage has changed only very recently. At any rate, as long as using the feminine is fine, so's using the masculine. Some writers even use both, switching between them. Me, I much prefer the singular-they, because I don't think keeping masculine the standard is tenable or desirable, and I find writing that uses the feminine harder to read (because there's a vast body of existing writing that defaults to masculine and it's by far the bulk of all material I've read in my life, so if I see a feminine pronoun it throws me off for a second as my brain reflexively starts to try to figure out who exactly we're talking about—this is getting better as the practice is wider-spread, but c'mon, let's just use the singular-they) and because it doesn't tend to generate discussion about pronoun choice.
