Our attitudes to pronouns are changing --- Of course there are lady diplomats! In this joke, one could argue that the contrast between genders adds to the joke's impact. Try it out using 'she' in both cases and you will find the distinction gets blurred.

In other contexts, the use of the masculine pronoun has been used as a default pronoun for centuries, a convention that has been questioned in the last few decades because of its tendency to perpetuate male primacy.

Source author: Biljana Scott biscott@diplomacy.edu