Ah, I understand now. Yes, that's a good question. It's a tiny bit complicated, because (I'm not entirely confident of this) in Chinese it's common to say "person must ..." The word for "a person" is simply "ren" and "he/she" is "ta," so obviously there's no saving in Chinese to say "he" or "she" rather than "a person." Also, in Chinese it isn't always obligatory to use a subject. So you might say, "a man came. After enter, ate food." Again, I'm not really that good at Chinese, so I may be wrong. One point where this might come up is, since the pronunciation is the same, suppose a person is telling a story and uses "ta" without specifiying whether it's male or female. What would the transcriber do? I suspect they'd use the male pronoun, but don't really know.

Incidentally, in Japanese, which I do know well, there are two pronouns for people, "kare" for "he" and "kanojo" for "she". And you can never use either of them if you don't know the gender of the person. You would have to be "that person". But there still is a sexist element, because a group of mixed males and females would be the plural of "he" and not of "she."

Oh, and come to think of it, in Chinese it's the same. When there is a class of boys and girls together, you use the plural of "he" not "she." Though of course, this is only in writing. In spoken Chinese they're equivalent.

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As above, so below

As I understand, the Chinese characters for "he" and "she" were created under Western influence.

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