Just stop already. Nobody notices these kinds of things, and if they're offensive to anyone, that's their problem. It's a math problem as old as the 1800s for gods sake. Stop already. Why, out of everything that is important in this world, would you immediately notice the fucking "man", out of all things?
I literally imagined a man in a 50’s style suit with a briefcase and wouldn’t have given it a second thought. I had to manually untangle that concept to add the realization that women can sell stuff too.
Maybe it has an effect on behavior? I’m not sure of any research behind gendered language.
It's called the Sapir-Worff hypothesis. Pinker called it something like "the most well known hypothesis in linguistics, too bad it's almost certainly false." It's pre-Chomsky, in date and concept.
