 This, Spender claims, provides circumstantial evidence that “males have encoded sexism into language to consolidate their claims of male supremacy” (Spender 1985: 144). Spender takes the evidence for this claim to be far more than circumstantial, however, and to support it she discusses the efforts of prescriptive grammarians. These include, for example, the claim that males should be listed before females because “the male gender was the worthier gender” (Spender 1985: 147, emphasis hers), and the efforts (noted earlier) to establish ‘he’ as the gender-neutral third-person English pronoun.