Q. I would swear that I saw a reference in your manual that approved of the use of “their” instead of a gender-biased singular pronoun. For example, “If the user has completed installing the program, they should put the CD-ROM back in the package,” instead of “If the user has completed installing the program, s/he should put the CD-ROM back in the package,” but on your Q&A, you dance around the answer to the question and suggest that you do NOT approve of the singular “their.” Can you tell us what is acceptable?
A. Yes, you saw it at 2.98 (note 9) in the fourteenth edition, but there was some regret at having written it, and we decided to abandon the idea for the fifteenth and sixteenth editions. Though some writers are comfortable with the occasional use of they as a singular pronoun, some are not, and it is better to do the necessary work to recast a sentence or, other options having been exhausted, use he or she. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see paragraph 5.227 in CMOS 16 and the entry for “he or she” under the “Glossary of Problematic Words and Phrases” at paragraph 5.220. [Update: As of the seventeenth edition, Chicago still recommends avoiding singular they as a generic reference, at least in formal writing. See paragraph 5.48, which now also discusses the use of singular they to refer to someone who does not identify with a gender-specific pronoun.]