Epicene avoidance?

[Damien Hall]

An ad for a Mellon post-doc in Sociolinguistics at Oxford, posted
yesterday, contains what looks like a strange tactic to avoid epicene
'they':

2) 'Applicants must have obtained his or her doctorate by the date of
taking up the post'

If we take this at face value, it's very awkward to me; no matter what you
think of the epicene pronoun, it would surely have been more natural to
write

2) 'Applicants must have obtained their doctorate ...', or (to avoid the
epicene _and_ retain plural 'applicants') 'a / the doctorate'.

The more I look at this, the more likely it seems that it's a bad piece of
editing combining aspects of (2) with aspects of

3) 'The successful applicant must have obtained his / her doctorate ...'
(but it would be strange not to address a job-ad to _anyone_ who wanted to
apply, as opposed to just the successful applicant).

This may not be a new combination to people who collect these (apologies if
it isn't), but it's new on me, and sufficiently strange-sounding that I
thought it worth posting here. For reference, and for anyone interested in
the posting because of its grammatical strangeness or for any other
reason(!), the whole thing is here:

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ABX022/mellon-postdoctoral-fellowship-sociolinguistics/

Damien

--
Damien Hall

Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border
Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York

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