Question: I've been taught that a *child* is gender-neutral noun. But in the textbook on linguistics I've been reading, the noun is used as feminine. For example, a sentence in the book goes like this:

> 
> The child must also learn many aspects of grammar from her specific linguistic environment.
> 
> 
> 

Is there an explanation for the use of the pronoun *her* instead of *its*?

Answer: 
"Child" is, indeed, gender-neutral.

For a long time, "he" was considered to be both the male pronoun and the non-gender-specific pronoun (see [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He#Gender_neutral)). An older text would talk about a child learning from his environment and it would be understood to mean that both male and female children do so. "They" has a [long history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they) of use as a gender-neutral pronoun and is widely accepted, though some continue to insist that it is wrong. The use of "she" as a gender-neutral pronoun appears to be something of a backlash against the former use of "he"; it's quite common in modern writing.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns#It_and_one_as_gender-neutral_pronouns) notes that "it" is considered OK to refer to a child in situations where there's no emotional investment, especially in scientific contexts. Indeed, Wikipedia uses your very example as a case where it's reasonable to use "it". On the other hand, if I was talking about your child and said "Is it OK if I give it some candy?", you'd be fully justified in slapping me in the face or worse.

The least controversial situation is to just rephrase the sentence. For example, "they" is absolutely uncontroversially the gender-neutral *plural* pronoun, and the sentence you quote in your question seems to be talking about children in general, rather than a specific single child. Thus,

> 
> Children must also learn many aspects of grammar from their specific linguistic environment.
> 
> 
> 

(Or, if you prefer, "linguistic *environments*", since not all children have the same one.)
English doesn’t have “grammatical” gender at all, not even for *he*, *she*, or *it*. The “gender” *he*, *she*, and *it* refer to the actual, real-world gender of the antecedent, not its grammatical gender. In general, one would use the word *she* for *child* because this particular child is female.

Even in cases such as this, where there is no actual person (or there are several people, in a mix of genders, and the text is referring to any one), the language still refers to the hypothetical “example person” as a person, with a gender. The pronouns used, therefore, reflect the gender of the example person. Again, this is not grammatical gender.

In the past, as a matter of convention, “the example person” was always male, and thus *he* was used as a pronoun for the example person. More recently, the example person will sometimes be written as female, that is, with *she*. Some authors will also use both roughly equally (though they can only switch when introducing a new example person; for clarity, any person who is supposed to be some consistent example individual could not switch genders).

The reason for this is simple: by having the example person consistently be male, you give the impression that all of the people involved are male. It has not always been clear when male was chosen by convention, or because the individual under discussion actually is expected to be male. Switching to female does not fix the ambiguity, but at least it makes things more even: by having *everything* use male examples, it gives the impression that men do *everything*.

Finally, *it* is not gender-neutral, it is the gender-specific pronoun for the neuter gender, that is, the gender of inanimate objects. It is almost-always inappropriate, if not exceedingly offensive, to refer to a person with *it* as it implies that he or she is not a person, or not even a living thing.