I love this story. Also I was curious so I found a PDF version and replaced all the male pronouns and titles with female ones, just to see if it became a different story. It did. It was super interesting in how differently it felt (come to think of it, I never did finish reading that version. Maybe that is how I should spend these last 3 days of vacation)

Le Guin has some good interviews where she talked about why she ultimately decided to use masculine pronouns. Let me see if I can find one … OH. It is in the afterward of at least one of the versions. http://theliterarylink.com/afterword.html