alt Hacker News> Also yes, it is 100% corporate woke-ism...
In your experience, sure.
Some of us have done it that way since Usenet in the early 1980s w/out ever having worked in corporations, attended HR meetings, and well before woke entered the recent zeitgeist lexicon.
Using they is indeed a grammatical usage stretching back centuries in the english language.
Oxford Eng. Dict. cites it used in that manner going back to circa 1200. (well, as ' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%BEe%C8%9D%C8%9D ' in Middle English)
Sure, it is a personal experience, but no, you cannot gaslight me out of my personal experience by citing your superior knowledge of Middle English. The existence of such construct is not germane here. Forcing people to use the language a certain way is. Anyone who has faced this knows exactly what I am talking about and they can judge for themselves. Since this subthread was adding precisely zero value, I am going to stop right here.