The problem of what pronoun to use to describe the third person singular has been around for a long time because in English this pronoun has been a gendered one. It used to be that people used the male form of he/him as the default that was tacitly supposed to include both genders but that assumption has long been rejected as sexist. People who are grammatical purists tried to find various ways around it. Resorting to switching everything in a sentence to just the plural form was not always possible and even when it could be done, tended to make sentences less specific and more bland. The more awkward circumlocution ‘he or she’ or ‘his or her’ tends to get really tedious after a while.
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