For the conspicuous use of the female default is distracting. When I read about economics, I want to think about economics. But as soon as I trip over that jarring "she" in this compelling book about currency valuations, I cease to think about economics. I have left Rickards's exhilarating financial war game. I get caught up instead in my own mental eye-roll: "Oh, for pity's sake, what an arselick."

Indeed, the grammatically hip usage alters the real content of that line. The subject is suddenly not the rules of a fiscal war game, but gender politics. In its deepest sense, Rickards's sentence decodes, "I am a right-on dude. Now no one can accuse me of being a sexist prick."

When I confirm that not a single participant mentioned in the American Defense Department's theoretical exercise is a woman, the writer's grammatical brown-nosing backfires. It serves only to highlight the fact that, despite the author's trendy style guidelines, his professional world is overwhelmingly male. The military brass, hedge-fund managers, think-tank wonks, and investment bankers with whom he's powwowing — they're all men, aren't they? "She" can participate as much as she likes, my butt. She isn't participating at all. She gets fobbed off with a pronoun in lieu of an invitation.

I'm afraid the boys can't win here. When men employ the universal "she", their ostentatious sensitivity comes across as pandering — a pandering that borders on condescension. When women use "she" to reference both sexes, they seem hectoring and touchy, and they also subvert the real meaning of their text. Even if the article is about agricultural policy, an intrusively synthetic "she" diverts the reader's attention to patriarchal bias in English. 

Privileging female pronouns is just as sexist as privileging male ones, and I'm of the anti-affirmative-action school that rejects two wrongs as making a right. Recall the equally poor solution to the dilemma of which pronoun should refer to God. The fashionable claim that "God loves all her children" is simply ridiculous. Accepting there is one, God doesn't have genitals. If anything, God is an it.

Gradually, language adapts. In today's casual discourse, we often say, "Each player could participate as much as they liked." In informal writing, I, too, will opt for "they" in singular constructions, preferring inclusiveness to grammatical correctness. It's likely this singular use of "they" will become increasingly standardised. That is an organic transformation of linguistic convention I could embrace. Meantime, forced-sounding insertions of "she" by female writers imply we've got an axe to grind. From male writers, all these artificial shes seem like just another form of showing off.