[…] Another aspect of the English language that came under fire is the use of ‘he’ and ‘his’ as generic pronouns, for example, when you don’t know the gender of a person you are referring to. For many, the generic ‘he’ implies a deliberate exclusion of women and it is now generally accepted that this usage should be avoided. But then the problem is: what pronoun can be used when you don’t know or don’t want to specify someone’s gender?

One pretty logical option is ‘he or she’, or ‘he/she’, or even ‘(s)he’. Unfortunately, these solutions are quite clumsy and, to be honest, can look or sound very awkward in a sentence; especially when you throw ‘his or her’ or ‘his/her’ into the mix as well! For example:

‘If the student has any questions, he or she can contact his or her lecturer.’

So if there is no succinct word for ‘he or she’ in English, why not make a new pronoun? This is what has happened in the Swedish language. Last year ‘hen’, a generic alternative to ‘han’ (he) or ‘hon’ (she), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The aim is to enhance the language by making it easier to speak about a person without specifying their gender, though some Swedish speakers are trying to promote the use of hen as a replacement for male and female pronouns; meaning everyone would be referred to without their gender being specified. However, this thinking has not spread widely and time will tell how the use of hen will develop in Swedish. Over the years many generic pronouns have been suggested for the English language, for example ‘zhe, zher, zhim’, and ‘ey, em, eir’, but none have managed to catch on so far. More.

See: TermCoord