This article examines how writing studies scholarship has responded to changes in society's understanding of gender. Combining grounded theory and corpus linguistic analysis using a self-compiled corpus of journal issues published between 1970-2020, the authors track changes in the usage of gendered versus gender-neutral nouns and pronouns with generic referents. While the analysis of pronouns was inconclusive, patterns of noun usage in writing studies journals over time reveal an overall preference for gender-neutral language and a reduction in masculine-coded nouns across several journals in the 1970s and 1990s. Analyzing the changing language of this scholarship using a combination of methodologies from writing studies and linguistics reveals how the discipline thinks about gender in a concrete, practice-informed way.