[Lore Discussion] Commanders' Genders and the use of "He".

I know they're Robots, however in the Lore I've read so far, the Faction Leaders are usually referred to via masculine pronouns.
I know the Dev Team and Player base are mostly made up of men but just wanted to check (just from a Lore standpoint) whether women will get a look in as Faction Leaders (ideally there's no reason it couldn't/wouldn't be 50/50 or experiment with gender-neutrality EDIT: Look to Edits 4/5 for the TL;DR revised suggestions this thread has generated).

Edit: I'm just going to put this here
All four Leaders are referred to by masculine pronouns:

Edit 2: For those who think that "He" is a neutral pronoun:
From the OED:
"A. pron. The subjective case of the masculine third person singular pronoun. I. As personal pronoun. 1. The male person or animal previously mentioned or implied or easily identified. Also (freq. with capital initial) with reference to God. a. As subject or (now formal) subject complement.
...
[When used in the general sense, it is usually in scientific terminology describing animals, not in characterising individuals in a literary narrative:]
(1b) Referring to an animal. Also used generically, without consideration of gender:
1790 R. Beilby Gen. Hist. Quadrupeds 27 The horsemen rode off the Bull from the rest of the herd, until he stood at bay.
1845 J. H. Ingraham Scarlet Feather ix. 58 With the tread of the velvet-footed pard when he creeps upon his prey.
1966 M. E. Murie & O. Murie Wapiti Wilderness iv. 71 Oh, I believe he's a pretty good horse. He may be a little bit snaky.
2001 Tropical Fish Hobbyist Apr. 107/2 The male guppy..has a modified anal fin..which he uses to inseminate the female."


Edit 3: Sorry that this has blown up so much Uber. My original post wasn't meant to be lengthy or antagonistic but I have had to evidence my claims because many (I'm guessing they're pretty much all dudes) see nothing wrong with calling everyrobot 'He'.


Edit 4: I'm currently leaning towards calling the Commanders 'It', as they are asexual and gender-neutral. This would work well with their loss of memory and attempts to rediscover their identities. We could even see some adopt gendered outlooks and personalities.

Edit 5: "They" would also be (possibly more) appropriate gender-neutral pronoun:

In a case of assembly-line produced robots, does gender really matter?

Do any of the Faction Leaders identify as Male?

They are genderless. Gender is a weakness.

Pretty sure it would make more sense if they were without gender, but since the gender neutral "it" is usually used to reference things that aren't sentient, it would seem weird to call something with a personality "it". In the developer commentary for portal 2 (or was it the first portal?) for instance, a developer comments on calling the player "he" or "she" when his or her gender isn't known. They instead use the singular "they", which I'd say is a good approach here as well, instead of using a generic "he".

In the case of the people reading about the Lore and identifying with the Leaders, yes it does.

Yes. All four Leaders are referred to by masculine pronouns:

1. "With the banner of the eagle fluttering in the breeze behind him, Commander Dominus halted accessing his central memory core and turned his attention to the situation reports now flooding in from his officers."
2. "Commander Ezek fired his lower thrusters and shot up into the air just as the first missile struck, leaving a smoking crater where he had been standing only seconds earlier."
3. "Commander Metrarch monitored the progress from his base on the far side of the system that his forces were now sweeping."
4. "...Osiris. They knew he was the key to victory. If he was destroyed it was all but assured. Osiris counted on this. Brilliant flashes began erupting among the Legonis units, which he could now see were light scout vehicles."

Why are they men if they're Robots? And seeing as we don't want to dehumanise them by calling them 'it', why shouldn't some of them have female identity-personality algorithms?

We're bound to have ladybots in the Lore at some point, I'd rather they be Leaders and not oddities.
Why not have a 50/50 gender-equal utopia in which everybody is desperately trying to annihilate each other?

'It' has derogatory connotations, I agree. They can't be used in singular accusative (I think that's what it's called?). E.g. "They knew he was the key to victory." would be "They knew ???? was the key to victory."

Using 'It' would stunt our identification and empathy with these figures which have personailties and ideologies.
I don't see why a Robot can't be referred to as feminine if we're all currently comfortable with them being referred to in the masculine and haven't felt the need to complain about it before.

"He" has also been used as a gender neutral pronoun in the past, so I don't think it's reasonable to think that the commanders identify as a gender just because Uber refers to one as "he".

Robot isn't a gender-dominated profession like janitor or secretary.
Nor should those roles be referred to in that way. That's why we say they were 'in the past'. I.e. before we attempted to move towards sexual equality.

This isn't German or French. Gender isn't tied to nouns like Robot.

English and the languages it's been derived from, culturally, have favoured male pronouns for millennia. It's hard to disentangle the bias from our everyday writing and speech.

As somebody taking a degree in English Literature I agree.
However, practically speaking, equal representation in this case is as hard as putting an 's' before 'he'.

I want to stress I not having a dig at UBER or anybody whatsoever here. I just wanted to point out a cultural norm we've adopted and attempt to move to more equal representation of sex (gender) in Lore.

It's more or less a literary trope at this point, "he" sounds better than "it".
Not to mention, calling a machine "she" has usually, for... some strange reason, been a thing used for cars/boats/other methods of transport.

And last I checked, commanders are not methods of transport.
Well, maybe the tank commander is...
FACTION 3 IS NOW ENTIRELY FEMALE.
Even though they have no gender.
I'll shut up now.

"He" is not gender neutral though.
Yes, "He" sounds better than "It".
"It" is used on inanimate/inhuman objects/unidentified animals.
The real question is does "He" sound better than "She"?
If it does then you're thinking only thinking as a man and not as a human.

The practice of referring to certain things (like ships) as "She" I think has something to do with lonely guys being out at sea for too long. It's an illogical and somewhat sexist tradition.
It's also not a tradition you can really justify, nor one which applies as it pre-dates being applied to "machines". Ships were referred to as feminine before ships became machines.

Frankly tradition and established tropes which have already been long since sunk aren't going to hold much water with me, sorry.

But that's exactly the burrito's point, at least in part: it's asking for an examination not only of the de facto masculine gender assignment, but possibly more importantly, why those default assumptions about gender exist in the first place. This one agrees with those who have pointed out how deeply intertwined the language and psychology of these biases are, however, this one would assert that the depth of that bias is precisely why it's so important to to give it close scrutiny. Unless we believe ourselves to be quite perfect, and living in a quite perfect world, then our current standards should always be available to question.

Girls and women in the video game industry are either naked or not included. Which is a ridiculous discrimination.

But in this case, I would be fine avoiding the dilemma entirely assuming that robots and AIs need no gender.

this, I d' say none of them even identify as male.

I'd rather the Lore just included females equally personally, as it'd be difficult to identify with 'it'.

So it's a good thing to promote a case that gender-female AI's are just as capable of being machines devoted to mass genocide as gender-male AI's can be?

They're referred to as male.

Yes. Because war in the distant future isn't dominated by one gender. Why shouldn't women be capable of genocide?
In all seriousness it's not about what the characters are doing, it's about the act of equal sexual representation in the Lore storytelling.