Some languages use the form also used for masculine as generic - officially, as part of their grammar, long before the political matter about what is appropriate exploded. To find that the English language does not follow this rule ("he" as generic) leaves some confused, and even unconvinced: 'she' looks like a modification of 'he', so 'he' looks generic.

In fact, their "close" relation is just apparent: it seems that 'he' comes from variations from the demonstrative 'ki' ("this/here"), but 'she', while still coming from a demonstrative, comes from a different demonstrative, 'so' (feminine 'seo') - the source of 'the' -, which came into use to disambiguate as original feminine 'heo' collapsed into 'he' in spoken language.