[signalsmith]

I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story.

So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.

[weberc2]

I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).

[GhostVII]

But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.

[geofft]

That makes it relevant for stories like "I met him at a bar and we shared a few drinks," but not "I sold her a cup of coffee this morning" or "She's interviewing for our team."

Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.