A recent radio headline was
Another member of the Canadian Armed Forces has taken his own life. This is the fourth suicide this week.
The presence of the word another somehow left me with the impression that the sentence meant all the suicides, or even all the Armed Forces members, are male. I happen to know that neither of those constraints is true. I also suspect the radio headline writer didn't intend to suggest that. Had the headline been:
A member of the Canadian Armed Forces has taken his own life. This is the fourth suicide this week.
... then I would not have drawn the same conclusions. I know how to write this sentence without implying anything about the gender of the latest soldier (use they/their, change verbs to eliminate any need for a possessive pronoun, etc) but I am curious about why saying another, and thus referring to a series of events, has (for me) the effect of blurring that possessive pronoun back so that it somehow applies to the whole series.
Am I the only person who is influenced by another like this? How do these sound?
Another student has missed his deadline for applying
Another farmer has put her farm up for sale
If another has this effect, does it have a name? I would probably avoid the effect by omitting another where there was a second sentence (as in the radio headline) to carry that information, and keeping it but rewording the rest to avoid possessive pronouns when there wasn't. But am I just being overly careful?