According to the report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those who used gender-neutral pronouns for the cartoon task were more likely to use non-male names in their short story. The gender-neutral pronoun also appeared to improve positive feelings towards LGBT people. The word hen, the researchers believe, helped to combat mental biases that favoured men, and raise awareness of other genders.
Sabine Sczesny, a professor of social psychology at the University of Bern, said the research was further evidence that gender-inclusive language could reduce gender-biases and “contribute to the promotion of gender and LGBT equality and tolerance”. [...]
“From at least the mid-nineteenth century onwards, new coinages have attempted to provide English with a grammatically uncontroversial gender-neutral singular pronoun and related adjectives,” said Jonathan Dent, senior assistant editor at the OED. “American writers of the 1860s and 1870s gave us (s)he or s/he and ze, while hir, first suggested in the form hier in 1910, was embraced by the Californian Sacramento Bee newspaper, which used it as an alternative to him or her and his or her between 1920 and the late 1940s.
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