in chinese, words have no grammatical gender, but there are still three gendered pronouns. the masculine pronoun is written as 他, the feminine is 她, and the neuter is 它. even though all three are written in a different chinese character, they are all still pronounced exactly the same: "tā" in mandarin. that is why many chinese learners of english do not use english pronouns correctly. in some contexts, if the gender is unknown, the pronoun will be written in pinyin as "ta" even if the rest of the document is written in chinese characters.