The future of the past looked so much more interesting. Not practical, but certainly interesting.

I'm curious why the author of this piece decided to use the gender neutral pronoun for the women who modelled this odd machine. They wrote:

> The demonstration model would climb into the six-foot-tall machine via ladder, then enter the chamber, with their head sticking out of the top. They'd set the water temperature, then the machine would start spraying them with jets of warm water, like the pre-wash cycle at a car wash.

These models were all women. This was the 1970s, and the photos support the reasonable assumption that this was not a demonstration where male models were used. Using gender neutral pronouns is sensible in many cases — I didn't go as far as to look into the author's biography for example, so I refer to them as they for the nonce — but is doing so when the gender is known (and possibly relevant given the social context of that time) now on the rise, or is this just hypercorrection?

Hypercorrection.

I think it's historically been OK to refer to any person using they/them/their. More recently, even in progressive circles I think, it's still OK as long as you don't have information about the person's preference that would make neutral pronouns offensive to them. Basically, it's fine until you know it's not.

It's true that all the supporting pictures in the article are of women, and you're likely right that all the demonstration models were probably women. But the machine is not gender-specific, the process of using it doesn't seem like it would be gender-specific, and the author was generalizing a series of demonstrations instead of a specific demonstration with a specific model. The subject of the sentences/paragraph you're concerned about - 'the demonstration model' - is itself gender neutral. For all of these reasons I think it makes sense why they/them pronouns were used here. Not strange or controversial at all.

> gender neutral pronoun

I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.

At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)

I interpreted that sentence as meaning that someone else would set the water temperature?

I don't know if all the models were women, perhaps they had some guys as well? (Or the author just doesn't want to commit, because they don't know?)

We see some pictures of models, but we don't know if those are all the models they had.