Why default to male? Because multiple generation of us got our writing marked wrong if we used a plural pronoun for a singlaur and "he" was the generic. We used he for unknowns and she for the thing we loved (e.g. ships). I would love for an agreed upon generic, and they is just a bad choice.
And as soon as everyone starts using s/he, bigender people get annoyed that heshe wasn't used. It's language...it's difficult to get everyday usage "normalized" into a different direction.
I nowadays just use he or she (or rather: try to stick to that - I fumble at times when writing casually), in german and in english. The german form is longer, because the noun also has a gender there.
