// Exactly as the title says

I was reading through my economics textbook and this passage came up:

The planner wants to maximize the economic well-being of everyone in society. What should this planner do? Should she just leave buyers and sellers at the equilibrium that they reach naturally on their own?

Emphasis on the sentence "Should she just leave buyers..."

This is something that I noticed a lot in academic writings, particularly textbooks and research papers. For the longest time "he" was the default gendered pronoun writers would use when referring to an unnamed, unknown, or arbitrary individual. In recent years (decades?), there's been a shift to using "she" rather than "he", or a mix of both to avoid the overuse of he/him/his as the default. This is particularly true in the field of philosophy, at least according to one of my philosophy professor. From the small selection of philosophy papers I've read this does seem like the trend.

But my question is, why not just use "they"? I appreciate the sentiment and effort of being more inclusive in the language used, but there's a perfectly fine gender-neutral pronoun right there. This way, we don't need to make any assumptions about gender at all! It's already common colloquially to refer to someone whose gender is unkown or irrelevant to the discussion with "they" (e.g., "someone left their umbrella"), so why not in the academia as well? In most cases where the pronoun she/he is used, it's not as if swapping it out with they would cause any confusion, as it's clear that in context it's not used as its plural form. Out of principle, I always use they/them/theirs as the default pronoun in both my academic and personal writings. Whenever I need to copy and paste passages from textbooks/papers, I always replace the pronoun with they. It's not necessarily a pet peeve or something I get all worked up over, but every time I see a writer use "she/he" when "they" would've been appropriate as well I sigh a little internally. May the singular "they" be as commonly used as "she" and "he" in academic writings one day.