While this is obviously biased in one way, the old norm used to be to just default to ‘Sir’ when you’re not sure.
You can see echoes of this in the way that many, many old writings use ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ to refer to just all people, all humans.
Certainly many of the people that spoke that way were themselves patriarchal, but very often the contrextual use of man/mankind is actually gender neutral.
You can also see echoes of the ‘default to Sir’ thing in the US Military: Everyone is a ‘Sir’, when you’re showing respect to a higher rank, regardless of their sex or gender.
But uh yeah at least personally myself, I’ve been writing ‘Dear Sir/Ma’am’ or something like that, when I don’t know the gender of … the person my letter or email is going to end up at.
There have been various proposals for a gender neutral honorific title, but afaik, none of them have stuck and gotten widely adopted.
While this is obviously biased in one way, the old norm used to be to just default to ‘Sir’ when you’re not sure.
You can see echoes of this in the way that many, many old writings use ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ to refer to just all people, all humans.
Certainly many of the people that spoke that way were themselves patriarchal, but very often the contrextual use of man/mankind is actually gender neutral.
You can also see echoes of the ‘default to Sir’ thing in the US Military: Everyone is a ‘Sir’, when you’re showing respect to a higher rank, regardless of their sex or gender.
But uh yeah at least personally myself, I’ve been writing ‘Dear Sir/Ma’am’ or something like that, when I don’t know the gender of … the person my letter or email is going to end up at.
There have been various proposals for a gender neutral honorific title, but afaik, none of them have stuck and gotten widely adopted.