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Comment by codesternews | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.

I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).

Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.

There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,

This is how it starts.

https://twitter.com/thecitywanderer/status/15161769835495301...

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>I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.

This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people "below them" how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&I is a grift.

>Its like pushing your culture on different countries.

I think the original point was there is no way for Google not to do this. Sometimes cultures have opposing viewpoints which makes a neutral decision impossible. One obvious example is with displaying disputed borders in Google Maps. Any decision there is going to be political. Lots of people are going to be upset with Google for making the wrong decision regardless of which decisions they make, but I think that anger is misplaced. The real problem is Google has the power to make this decision for too many people. Companies like Google are simply too powerful and need to be broken up.

There is no reason to put this feature. This is political feature and can be used in many ways and affects other countries and cultres you cant imagine

There are second order and third order consequences of having this kind of features.

Google should not push their politics and agenda on other countries and cultures. It affects every other country in different ways.

In future this kind of feature can be used in many ways we dont know.

Well, yes this is a political feature, but your comment leads me to believe I didn't make my point clear enough. Almost every feature is political when you are the size of Google. You may only be objecting to this feature because it goes against your culture. However there are thousands of other decisions that Google has made that support your culture at the expense of some other culture. Many people here are viewing the problem as Google choosing the wrong culture. I am saying we should instead focus on the immense power Google has to force one culture on another culture.

If Google is broken up, the decisions of the new smaller companies will still be political.

So what would have been achieved?

Competition. Google is able to use its power to push out competitors. Without that power, there would likely be lots more companies challenging the various product categories that Google currently dominates. Not every company would reach the same decision on all these issues, especially if these companies arose in different cultures.

presumably those smaller companies would be beholden to the jurisdictions they're located in, where the laws are drafted by people who are democratically elected.

so, i guess democracy would have been achieved. or at least a relative increase in democratic control

well at the very least the companies in question actually reside in the jurisdiction in which they serve and are thus at least in some form accountable to the people and hopefully share some values.

Being German I'm kind of tired of the fact that American social media sites have for some reason exported QAnon protests to our cities while women get banned for showing a nipple.

Is the suggestion there actually complaining about landlord being a gendered word? I didn’t even realise that people thought landlord was gendered although I know landlady is a word. Often a landlord is a company, for example.

But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.

Sometimes people in my culture treat obviously gendered words as gender-neutral to the point that they re-gender them when they need to be specific. For example "policeman lady", "postman lady" or "men's perfume". So I think the gender-neutralizing of words happens naturally without having to change the word itself, just like your example of landlord becoming gender neutral.

> But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise?

I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.

>I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).

Ask your hetrosexual male friends how many guys they have slept with. I would imagine response will illustrate "guys" is less gender neutral than might think.

Context matters.

Some locations they use "y'all", some use "you guys". It's gender neutral in that sense.

In the sentence you gave, the context wouldn't be gender neutral because you said "slept with".

If you enter a room and say hey guys, it's neutral. If it's all girls you could say hey gals, which would be fine, either works.

I can't imagine anyone other than liberals that would be offended by a blanket statement of "hey guys".

It's really a stupid thing to get hung up on. It's like searching for something to offend you.

It doesn't make sense until you realize the goal. What you're doing is creating arbitrary rules to form a kind of censorship via social pressure because you can't censor speech legally.

Women use you guys to refer to a group of other women all the time. As you said context matters.

I don't think words need to be gender neutral. Grammatical and biological gender are not really the same. I think this urge to clean languages is a bit detached.

Personally, I have no skin in the game of gendered language. Sometimes I think it's exaggerated, sometimes I think it's necessary. I do have a hard time changing how I speak, old habits die hard. As far as people and everyday communication is concerned, I address people the way they want to be addressed. Nothing to do with gender, just general politeness. E.g. I wouldn't use a nick name people hate, so why would I insist in calling someone "her" (or "he") if they don't want to?

I wasn't referring to calling someone another gender. Doing so is just minimum courtesy. I do believe that courtesy cannot be mandated though and I would not want anyone having it mandated for my sake.

I meant words like mailman and such. Of course a mailman could also be a woman. I think calling someone a mailwoman is fine, but the word does not carry intrinsic offense.

We don't disagree, I think. Gender neutral job titles are ok, as far as I'm concerned. Mostly that is, as the female jobs are, historically, more often lower income jobs in the same domain (nurse vs. doctor comes to mind). Coming back to courtesy, if a female mailman prefers to be addressed as mailwoman I would do so.

Funny side note, the German language has some interesting edge cases. E.g. the rank of Hauptmann (Captain in the army and air force) usually isn't gendered, the other ranks aren't neither. So usually female soldiers of that rank are addressed as Frau Hauptmann. The funny thing is Hauptmann is also last name... The plural of the rank Hauptmann is gender neutral again, it's Hauptleute...

i just go with mail carrier and keep it simple

Of course, I just think that the term mailman, even if gendered, isn't exclusionary.

I don't feel like i have the right to decide as an individual dude whether it is or not.

Taking offence is an individual decision too.

I don't think see it as "taking offense" personally. If somebody just happens to prefer it, then I don't see why I wouldn't. No skin off my back.

I don't believe this is entirely honest since you probably also have a limit in what you are willing to accommodate, be that faith, self-identification or just a usual form of courtesy.

Granted, apathy would be my solution too, but here I am expected to align the way I express myself.

I do believe that the desire to frame anything gender neutral is not something I want to put too much thought into but I don't mind conflict if someone requests to accommodate what is basically a faith.

Inclusivity is a problem in every country.

> There is no issues of inclusivity in our country.

Your country has a literal caste system, go ahead and pull the other one.

There are many countries this could apply to. For example, landlord, as in someone who rents out a property is considered gender neutral here in Ireland. The term landlady exists, but is only used for female publicans, and only rarely, as publican and vintner are both used more frequently in that context.

"Guys" is mostly male oriented, but wouldn't be unheard of for a mixed gender group, and similarly "Lads" here is often gender neutral despite it being the most male of working class male stereotypes in the country that is our nearest neighbour.

Here in Australia, “guys” is generally used in a gender neutral way. Even when hanging out with groups of only women, I’ll use it and so will others without batting an eye. Eg, “What are you guys doing after this?”

Years ago I had an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist. I’ve been thinking about it for years since her comment. I think in an Australian context she’s wrong. And I think we move in the direction of gender equality by making words less gendered. Not by inserting gender bias where there was none.

You make “landlord” a gendered term by policing it as such. What a waste of a good word.

In the USA, guys can be used in a gender neutral context, but it also can be used to refer to males only.

"Ok guys, lets go to lunch" is probably gender neutral.

"Guys line up on the right, gals on the left" is not.

"Do you sleep with guys?" is not gender neutral.

In South Africa "guys" is gender neutral too.

I wish the Americans can keep their weird culture war within their own borders.

This one is still widely argued; many women say they don't care and are happy to be included in the guys, and others consider it a real terrible thing to say. I have to conclude that it's unlikely that stopping using guys as a gender-neutral address will truly move the needle in equality.

> an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist.

How odd.

Did you ask why they are so sensitive? Most of us elsewhere on the planet would laugh at such a ridiculously petty statement.

Landlord is gender-neutral in English, and has been so for a long time.

Even in the US? Because as the link the grandparent comment shows, it is one of the words Google Docs is warning away from as insufficiently inclusive

Yes, even in the US. But of course, given enough influence, you can make absolutely anything non-inclusive. And social pressure will make everyone have to accept it.

I also find it baffling that inclusivity folks find a term that used to be male exclusive becoming applicable to both male and female as problematic. Wouldn't they want something like this to happen?

I don't see this as too baffling- in their logic, if you have two alternatives (landlord and landlady, say) and landlord gets picked, it's evidence of patriarchy (because it defaulted to male). They would prefer "landperson", or perhaps "rent seeking capitalist"

Yes, just like "actor" is gender-neutral (although "actress" is still explicitly female).

When I rented a room from a woman in Atlanta, the other tenants and I always referred to her as "landlord" and nobody batted an eye. The only time I hear "landlady" is when One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer plays on the radio. So that's my datum.

Would you say Ireland has no issues with inclusivity? Come on.

Why does e.g. Ireland's poor treatment of the travelling community mean we need to defer to American interpretations of language? Is America such a shining paragon that everyone needs to copy their every action?

This is a lazy argument

I didn't make that argument, though.

If the starting position was "America's diversity concerns are not [e.g.] Ireland's concerns" I'm more sympathetic! In fact I think having software that tries to do this is fundamentally broken! But the starting position is always "we don't have any problems here" which is an even lazier, and wrong, argument.

In that case you're as equally arguing against an argument I didn't make. I did not say that Ireland has no problems. I said that Ireland does not have problems related to the gendered implications of landlord, guys, or lads, due to these words having much less gendered implications in the Irish context. (and elsewhere in the thread, that the south eastern Ireland usage of "boy" does not have the racial implications that it does in certain contexts in the US).

Nowhere did I say that Ireland has no issues with inclusivity.

You started this reply chain on a response to a post claiming India has no issues with inclusivity, and mentioned instead we should also be considering Ireland for some reason! What are you doing?

This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.

Inclusivity is fine, as long as you're not encouraged to be inclusive? Are you sure you think it's fine?

It's certainly fair to say that you feel that inclusivity has gotten out of hand and that it shouldn't change the way we talk. But it seems disingenuous so say that it's "fine", but think it's scary when it's suggested to you.

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