[true_religion]

I can't say definitively, but here's my two cents about the practice of social interaction....

Changing the way you speak to someone based on a single coarse criteria is a poor way to go about social interaction.

You have an entire person in front of you and can guage how to say something based on your past knowledge of their personality, context, the way they're dressed, their current body language, anything else you've gleaned about them.

If all you know about them is that they are male or female, then you'd best just adopt a neutral posture until more information streams in.

Right now the only thing you can guess at with any real degree of accuracy knowing someones gender is which gender they prefer romantically.

[roguecoder]

And how far their genital nerve-cluster protrudes! ;-) (Though that's still overlapping bell curves, of course, and totally irrelevant to any work conversation that does not involve participating in pornography...)