她 = 女 (nǚ, woman) + 也 (yě, phonetic) — but the etymology is unusual because the character was designed, not inherited. Most Chinese characters arrived through millennia of organic evolution; 她 was proposed in writing by a single person, Liu Bannong (刘半农), in 1917, and entered standard use within two decades. It is one of the only widely used characters in modern Chinese with a known birth date and inventor.

The construction is a clean substitution. 他 tā already existed (亻 + 也) to mean "he, him, another." Liu kept the phonetic 也 (which had no native meaning here, only sound) and replaced the person radical 亻 with the woman radical 女. Same pronunciation; different visual marker; new grammatical category. A graphic argument made in ink.

The presence of 也 inside both 他 and 她 is significant: 也 appears in many third-person and demonstrative-like words across the family — 他, 她, 它, 牠 (animal-only "it," used in Taiwan), 祂 (deity "He/She," modern Christian usage). It is, in effect, the phonetic backbone of the entire tā cluster. The radicals do all the semantic work: 亻 person, 女 woman, 宀 (in 它) earlier "snake/object," 牜 ox-radical, 礻 spirit-radical.

The story begins with translation. In the 1910s, Chinese intellectuals were translating European literature at industrial pace — Ibsen, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Shaw — and they kept colliding with the same problem. English distinguishes he from she; French and German do the same with elle/sie. Classical Chinese had no such distinction. The pronoun 他, in use for centuries, covered any third-person referent regardless of gender. Translators rendered "she" with 他 and lost information the source carried.

In 1917, the poet and linguist 刘半农 Liu Bannong (1891–1934), then teaching at Peking University and one of the central figures of the New Culture Movement, proposed the new character 她 in correspondence with his colleague 周作人 Zhou Zuoren. Zhou had been wrestling with how to translate the Greek nymph "she" in a poem. Liu wrote back suggesting 女 + 也. The earliest published use is in his 1920 poem 《教我如何不想她》 ("How Could I Not Think of Her"), later set to music by Zhao Yuanren and one of the most famous early-modern Chinese songs.

The proposal was attacked from both sides. Conservatives objected that Chinese had functioned for two thousand years without gendered pronouns and did not need this Westernization of the script. Some literary critics dismissed 她 as ugly, redundant, and a capitulation to foreign grammar. Feminists objected on different grounds: why should the female-marked character be the new addition while the male-default 他 remained unmarked? The Marxist writer 陈寅恪 and others pointed out that the asymmetry encoded a hierarchy — men as the default human, women as a marked variant. A few proposed using 伊 yī (the classical literary "she") instead, since it was already gendered in some texts and avoided the asymmetry.

By the late 1920s 她 had won the practical fight. Its supporters argued translation needed it, modern fiction wanted it, and the parallel triad (他/她/它) was tidy. The objections did not disappear so much as become inert; they resurface periodically — most prominently in the 2010s "她字之争" online debates over whether women should reject 她 in favor of 他 to undo the marked/unmarked asymmetry.

The fact that 她 sounds identical to 他 in speech is the most striking feature of the whole episode. Liu Bannong won the writing system but never the spoken language. Mandarin still has no gendered third-person pronoun in the air — the distinction is visible only on the page.

Modern Mandarin has, in writing, the most articulated third-person pronoun system in any major living language: human-male, human-female, non-human, animal (regional), divine (religious). All five collapse to a single spoken syllable. The split is structurally striking — most languages either have gender (English, Romance, Germanic) or do not (Finnish, Turkish, classical Chinese, indigenous languages of East Asia broadly). Modern written Chinese has gender; modern spoken Chinese does not.

The plural forms inherit and slightly modify the same pattern. 他们 tāmen (they) is used for any group containing one or more men, or any group of unknown gender — the unmarked default. 她们 tāmen (they, all-female) is used only when the group is known to be entirely women. 它们 handles non-human plurals. The asymmetry is identical to the singular: female-marking is the marked case.

她 will not appear in classical 成语. Every 成语 in current use was fixed in the literary record long before 1917 — the Han dynasty, the Tang, the Song, the Ming. The third-person feminine sense in those phrases is carried by other words: 伊, 之, 其, or no pronoun at all (Chinese drops pronouns when context allows). The chengyu below all reference female figures or the feminine; none of them use 她.