Hacking inclusion by customizing a Slack bot | Hacker News Reader

Hacking inclusion by customizing a Slack bot

18f.gsa.gov

27 pointsSymbiote37 comments

I am sensitive to this and never use "guys" when sending an email. So you can imagine my surprise a few years back when I overheard a female teenage soccer player address her female teammates during a scrimmage with "hey guys...".

edit: just asked my 14 y/o (going on 30) daughter. She regularly uses "guys" to address her girl friends and went so far as saying "what am I supposed to call them? Gals? Girls? That sounds wierd."

edit 2: wife states she'd use "guys" to address a group of women.

Background: raised in Miami by northern parents, currently residing in NC. Wife raised all over (airforce brat). I'm not immune to using "y'all," but "all y'all" is a bridge too far.

I was going to say, I've seen it used as a casual alternative to people so much that I consider it a fairly inclusive term. Then again, it may be a regional thing, where it wouldn't be seen as such if it's not commonplace.

It's very common here in the UK to use "guys" with zero connotation of gender. My daughter's gymnastics teachers (an entirely female class) uses it, my daughter's dancing teacher (ditto), my wife with my two daughters, my female employees with our group as a whole.. I veer towards "folks" to play it safe and in respect of people I know who feel strongly about it, but it's quite a modern American concern in my experience.

I find "gang" an odd alternative to suggest in language delicate contexts (i.e. where "guys" is already causing offense) considering it relates to crime.

"Guys" as a fairly neutral term for a mixed-gender group of people or group of women is a very very informal usage; it makes sense that a group of really close friends might choose to use it with each other in a casual and affectionate way.

The idea of the bot is to be mindful of gendered language when talking to your coworkers in your workplace, which is a different and slightly more formal context.

No disagreement there.

Interestingly enough, if you look up guy in a dictionary[0], definition #2 is:

> Usually, guys. Informal. persons of either sex; people: > Could one of you guys help me with this?

My former (female) boss used to address the mixed-gender team as guys quite often.

[0]http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/guy

As an additional data point, a former client (female) addressed our mixed-gender team as gals. This is something the article explicitly calls out as taboo. It didn't bother me (male) at all nor did it seem to alienate anyone on the team. Disclaimer: I use "guys" as mixed gender a lot and this slack bot would really piss me off; the opposite of "valuing, respecting, and supporting the needs of every individual".

Interestingly enough, people tend to think that "guys" as referring to a group is gender-neutral: http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/.

disclaimer: this is probably skewed by the particular cohort that Julia Evans was able to survey.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but I certainly don't consider "guys" to be gender specific. If I were talking about a group of exclusively males, I would say "boys" or "men".

Or, in some regions and in colloquial conversation with a group of male friends, "dudes".

I heard three young women refer to each other as "dude" in the Portland airport a week ago. It seems to be a generational thing.

It's interesting, I don't consider it gender specific either, but it does sound more fitting when directed at an all male group or to single out the males in a mixed-gender group.

This is stupid to people from the Midwest. We've been using "you guys" as the plural of you for quite some time and, in the examples listed, most of us would say it has no gender.

How is publicly shaming someone for using a colloquial term inclusive?

Would be more efficient as a private message from the bot: No public shaming, no noise.

When I was a teenager back in the 90s, one of the first people I met online was a bulimic girl from Indiana with a distorted view of her body. I was interested in programming and taught myself to write scripts for the Windows IRC client mIRC. She would constantly mention how "fat" she thought she was. I would always dutifully respond "No, you aren't fat", naively thinking that might help her condition.

One day I decided to automate this process. I created an event handler when the word "fat" was said that would perform /msg $$1 "no, you aren't fat". However, I failed to add a variable delay in seconds, so it was quickly obvious to her that it was automated. She was a smart woman, so she wrote a simple loop like:

while(1) { /msg redwards510 fat }

and executed it. This would cause us both to instantly get disconnected due to "Excess Flood". I decided to disable it after that.

This is mostly about social signalling. The presence of the bot conspicuously telling people not to use the term "guys" signals to both men and women on the team that influential people on the team are feminist. So what matters isn't whether or not "guys" is technically a valid term for a mixed-gender group; what matters is that the ban on "guys" will be interpreted as feminist.

> This ensures that every person feels comfortable to be themselves at work, and it improves the quality of work our team produces.

Interesting thesis, has this turned out to be true?

An okay (not great) way to test this would be to only turn that on in certain channels.

I would say it is an inclusive term, and in my experience, used frequently as such by people of all genders.

There is a lot that can be done in tech to progress towards gender inclusivity, however publicly calling out use of words which historically conveyed exclusivity yet nomoreso detracts from more effective means.

Just about every single female I know uses "guys" gender-neutrally. Most insidious.

robots enforcing political correctness. scary.

Government built robots, at that

I am strongly in favor of switching over to y'all, but then again I came from the south.

I learned "y'all" in grammar class. English was invented without a 2nd person plural pronoun, so the South fixed it for y'all.

I know this might hurt y'all's pride, but yous can't claim to be the only ones to have done so.

Specifics about 'guys' aside, I like the idea, and there's a library that would probably help to implement more rules - http://alexjs.com/. There are a few text editor plugins using this library to basically lint your document with suggestions like using 'their' instead of 'his' in ambiguous situations and so on.

These guys are wasting taxpayer dollars.

Did you mean drones ?

I work at 18F, but am speaking for myself. It takes about a minute to add a Slackbot response, and posting the article helps us attract better candidates by showing our commitment to a good working environment.

I would argue that this article may actually harm your efforts at attracting better candidates.

The slackbot responses are equivalent to public shaming for using a widely accepted gender neutral phrase to address a group of people.

This makes 18F seem like a highly PC environment to work in.

Yeah, I would never work there after reading this. This makes it look like a place where passive-aggressively policing behavior is common.

I'm not even one to say racist or do sexist things! This just smells ... bitchy I guess?

I appreciate the feedback, and I don't consider 18F to be "highly PC" (at least to other places I've worked). I guess personally, while "guys" is a common term, it doesn't seem like a truly gender neutral phrase - I wouldn't ever call a woman a "guy," so why would the plural work?

In reading further about this just now, one interesting note is that "guy" is not neutral, and "guys" in the 3rd person is not neutral, but "you guys" (the second person) is used more generally.

Here are some links: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11816/is-guy-gend... https://www.quora.com/Is-the-word-guys-gender-neutral http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/10/slang https://www.reddit.com/r/genderqueer/comments/2kr0m0/is_the_...

> helps us attract better candidates

I'd be curious to know if better programmers recoil at the gender-neutral "guys."

Doubtful, but this generates controversy, which in turn exposes members of the tech community to the brand.

I would find such a bot REALLY annoying. And I have a hard time imagining how others would not, unless they had already tried to put themselves on a guy-less diet.

Since this is a post about "how we work", I would imagine that I would initially get really annoyed, and then be reminded by how it is just a front for social pressure from colleagues/higher-ups. Then when someone asks about how such a reminder has been working for me, I'd just say Great! Really kept me on my toes, such an effective reminder. ...

Not that I even use "guys" that much in any case (or English in daily life!).

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