Slavic languages notoriously have gender for every object. In russian “friend” have two variants, one for male gender, one for female. Same at least with Ukrainian and Serbian. So when I translate sentence to English (which only have one word for “friend”) I subconsciously use default word + she/he to empathize gender.

It’s annoying habit, cause when I say or refer to “user” for example, I always assume it’s “he/him”.

Guess same for your colleagues.