Laxystem, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and other Slavic languages require verbs in the past tense to match the gender of the person you're talking about. No way around it whatsoever except the absolutely ugly "(а)" at the end. Since Russian is my native language, my perfectionism can't possibly allow this. I even inflect people's names correctly.

By the way, this isn't a required field. You can just leave it as "not specified".