We no longer use "he/she" as standard. We use "they" instead.
I don't know why you think that. Both are still and have long been in common use.
Also, if people are creating a form or similar, with the question that used to be "What gender are you? Male/Female", they need to be aware that the question should now be worded something along the lines of "With which gender do you identify?
This is a matter of opinion, surely. I won't argue that it
is often worded like that but whether it
should be is still open to discussion. The use of
should here betrays both a presumption that gender self-identification is acceptable and a belief about what is right/wrong, which is a political belief.
I don't mean to argue about the politics of the matter, but I will argue that dictating the use of language surrounding the issue of gender is politically motivated. Words like
should and
have to (post #6, to which Tarheel took offence) express a personal opinion of how one thinks others have an ethical duty to act. That has nothing to do with language. If we're talking about language, we're talking descriptively about what people say, not what they should say.
I'm guessing the chart referred to in the original post relates at least indirectly to the ongoing feminist discussion of the proportion of girls who go on to study and graduate in STEM subjects (particularly engineering, I think) versus non-STEM subjects at university. There's a ton of literature on this issue, both academic and non-academic. Here's a typical example of an article on a related subject published by the Harvard Business Review:
Research shows that class projects and internships reinforce a masculine culture.
hbr.org
The language used throughout revolves around the disproportionate number of women/females versus men/males. At no point is there mention of other genders.
Here's a link to recent statistics from Engineering UK:
The following are some key pieces of data most often requested.
www.wes.org.uk
It is not atypical in discourse surrounding this issue to think solely in terms of binary genders (especially in feminist discourse)—a way of thinking that is natural for what I think is a large majority of the general population. I don't think the writer of the article linked above is deliberately making any kind of point by not mentioning any other genders, but is merely just thinking in the same binary way as most other people.