Gender in English

A system of grammatical gender, whereby all noun classes required an explicitly masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Thus, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender in this sense. However, it does retain features relating to natural gender, with particular nouns and pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of a particular sex, and neuter pronouns. Also, in some cases, [|feminine pronouns] are used by some speakers when referring to ships, churches, nation states and islands.
Usage in English has evolved with regard to an emerging preference for gender-neutral language. There is now large-scale use of they as a third-person singular pronoun instead of the traditional generic he when referring to a person of unknown gender. Certain traditional feminine forms of nouns are also increasingly avoided, with the male form of such nouns having become gender-neutral.

Gender in Old English

had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of modern German, with three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. Determiners and attributive adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun they modified. Also the nouns themselves followed different declension patterns depending on their gender. Moreover, the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent.
Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages, remarkably opaque: that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the word; this was especially true for nouns referencing inanimate objects. Learners would have had to simply memorize which word has which gender. Although nouns referring to human males were generally masculine and for the most part words for human females were feminine, as Charles Jones noted, "it is with those nouns which show explicit female reference that the sex specifying function of the gender classification system appears to break down,..." Most words referencing human females were feminine, but there was a sizable number of words that were either neuter or even masculine. Here are the discrepant nouns referring specifically to human females as listed by Jones:

Noun	Gender	Meaning	Modern cognates
æwe	neut.	"married woman"
broþorwif	neut.	"brother's wife"
fæmenhadesmon	masc.	"virgin"
foligerwif	neut.	"prostitute"
forþwif	neut.	"matron"
freowif	neut.	"freewoman"
hiredwifmon	masc.	"female member of a household"
lærningmægden	neut.	"female pupil"
mædencild	neut.	"female child"
mægden	neut.	"young girl"	English maid, maiden; German das Mädchen
mægdenman	masc.	"virgin"
mægþman	masc.	"virgin"
mennenu	neut.	"handmaiden"
næmenwif	neut.	"married woman"
sigewif	neut.	"victorious woman"
siþwif	neut.	"noble lady"
unrihtwif	neut.	"mistress"
wif	neut.	"woman"	English wife; German das Weib
wifcild	neut.	"female child"
wiffreond	masc.	"female friend"
wifhand	masc.	"heiress"
wifmann	masc.	"woman"	English woman
wynmæg	neut.	"winsome maid"
yrfenuma	neut.	"female heir"

Old English had multiple generic nouns for "woman" stretching across all three genders: for example, in addition to the neuter and the masculine listed above, there was also the feminine. For the gender-neutral nouns for "child", there was the neuter and the neuter . And even with nouns referring to persons, one could not always determine gender by meaning or form: for example, with two words ending in -mæg, there was the female-specific neuter noun, meaning "winsome maid" or attractive woman; as well as the gender-neutral noun meaning "paternal kindred" or member of father's side of the family, but which was grammatically feminine:.
In short, inanimate objects are frequently referred to by gendered pronouns, and, conversely, there exist nouns referring to people having a grammatical gender that does not match their natural gender. Nonetheless, in Old English, pronouns may follow natural gender rather than grammatical gender in some cases. For details of the declension patterns and pronoun systems, see Old English grammar.

Decline of grammatical gender

While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in northern and midland dialects. This correlates with the geographical extent of the Viking Danelaw in the late 9th and early 10th centuries: for almost a century Norse constituted a prestige language with regard to the southern Northumbrian and east Mercian dialects of Old English.
By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline: the Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system. One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that : previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative: both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation. The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.
Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s. Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender, and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.

Modern English

Gender is no longer an inflectional category in Modern English. Traces of the Old English gender system are found in the system of pronouns. Nonetheless, Modern English assumes a "natural" interpretation of gender affiliation, which is based on the sex, or perceived sexual characteristics, of the pronoun's referent. Exceptions to this generality are few and debatable, for example anaphoric she referring to ships, machines, and countries. Another manifestation of natural gender that continues to function in English is the use of certain nouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of a particular sex: widow/widower, postman/postwoman etc.
Linguist Benjamin Whorf described grammatical gender in English as a covert grammatical category. He argued that gender as a property inherent in nouns is not entirely absent from modern English, citing given names such as "Jane" and words like "daughter", which are normally paired with gendered pronouns even if the speaker does not know the person being referred to. Linguist Robert A. Hall Jr. argued that these are simply examples of natural gender and not grammatical gender, as daughters are always female and people named Jane are overwhelmingly likely to be female. Moreover, if a person named Jane is a man, there is nothing grammatically incorrect with saying "Jane is bringing his friends over."

Personal pronouns

The third-person singular personal pronouns are chosen according to the natural gender of their antecedent or referent. As a general rule:

he is used when the referent is male, or something to which male characteristics are attributed;
she is used when the referent is female, or is an object personified as female – this is common with vessels such as ships and airplanes, and sometimes with countries. An example is in God Bless America: "Stand beside her, and guide her through the night with a light from above."
it is used when the referent is something inanimate or intangible, a non-animal life-form such as a plant, an animal of unknown sex, or, less often, a child when the sex is unspecified or deemed unimportant. It is also used in the interrogative for people in some phrases such as, "Who is it?".

Pronoun agreement is generally with the natural gender of the referent rather than simply the antecedent. For example, one might say either the doctor and his patients or the doctor and her patients, depending on one's knowledge or assumptions about the sex of the doctor in question, as the phrase the doctor does not itself have any specific natural gender. Also, pronouns are sometimes used without any explicit antecedent. However, as described above, the choice of pronoun may also be affected by the particular noun used in the antecedent.
When the referent is a person of unknown or unspecified sex, several different options are possible:

use of he or she, he/she, s/he, etc.
alternation or random mixture of she and he
use of singular they
use of it
use of generic ''he''