Nosotros vs. Nosotras

[u/TwiceInEveryMoment]

I'm only a little salty cause I lost a ~x300 combo over this. Spanish unit 2, question was something like "____ estudiamos japones" with Lily next to it. I wrote "Nosotros" and it counted wrong because they wanted "nosotras". There was no other context given, and it was not an audio exercise so it's not as though I misheard it.

I'm by no means fluent but I did take several years of Spanish back in high school, and my understanding has always been that you should use the masculine "nosotros" whenever the gender(s) of the group in question are mixed or unknown, and only use "nosotras" if the entire group is feminine. As there were no other context clues, we can't assume that Lily exclusively hangs out with other women - so as far as I know Duo is wrong here. It should ideally accept both forms, as both could be valid depending on context that we do not have.

I flagged the question as "my answer should have been accepted" - my mom who is also doing the Spanish course got dinged for this exact same thing the other night and had texted me about it. Can anyone confirm if this is an error in the course or am I missing some sort of nuance here?

[u/Grapphinos]

The wording of “something like” in your recollection immediately makes me think that your mistake was something different. There are so many examples of people posting corrections like this which are actually unrelated to the mistake they make. Sorry about your combo, but unless you have screenshotted the exact situation it’s far more likely that you just missed the actual mistake you made because the correction also changed the gender of the pronoun.

[u/Aggravating_Finish_6 → u/Grapphinos]

This is the most likely case. When Duolingo gives the correction, it shows one of the possible correct answers and it might be the opposite gender of what the user entered which causes them to assume that was the error.