unless you have an ambiguous name, people can tell if you’re female even if you don’t put pronouns. If they’re going to discriminate, you avoiding adding pronouns won’t make a blind bit of difference.
I don’t think that’s actually true, SweetPetrichor. There have been studies done that show that women themselves, when reminded beforehand that they are female, perform less well on tests in traditionally male dominated areas than they do if they are not reminded.
Presumably all these women were very well aware of being female before taking the tests, and yet it was the reminders that served to reinforce a lack of confidence in their own ability, at an unconscious level, to the extent that they actually underperformed.
By the same token, yes, women are already discriminated against on the basis of their female names, but drawing extra attention to their femaleness can only serve to amplify and intensify that possibility of discrimination.
So many of the messages we give out and receive operate at an unconscious level, and misogyny itself still operates very vigorously at an unconscious level even in seemingly progressive western societies, so even people who think they have no bias - even women themselves - risk downgrading their perception of women’s abilities and competence when they are constantly reminded of the fact of their being female.
This just adds to the already extant burden of discrimination, which we are by no means close to resolving - proven by those experiments where people simply pretend to be the opposite sex for a while and are treated completely differently as a result.
It harms women, who are already being harmed more than enough.