Removed use of gendered pronoun | Hacker News Reader

Removed use of gendered pronoun

github.com

33 pointstosh61 comments

  Glad this didn't go through. The White Knights of tech are getting a bit
  over their heads on this. One thing is to raise awareness of a problem that
  exists throughout society -- not just tech, a whole different one is to go
  to the extent of requesting a pull request to remove gendered references.
  That helps no one. Zero. It does not advance anyone's argument.

Gosh, it's pretty upsetting that there are people who believe this. In any case, though, I'm glad that the PR went through. A small step in the right direction.

Why is it upsetting? I wholeheartedly agree that this particular case is a triviality.

I tend to use gender-neutral pronouns in written language myself, but I do not see any significant difference in using gendered ones, either. They can be used to describe hypothetical scenarios that apply to everyone reading the documentation.

I've noticed a recent tendency to use female pronouns extensively, something that I am not bothered by at all.

But a lot of us notice. A lot of us notice that it's usually 'he'. And a lot of us notice that that's not for us.

A small step? So what would the full step be? What would the consequences be?

Will nobody in the future be able to refer to another person as 'him', 'her', 'she' or 'he' unless they have full confirmation of that person's declared gender identity?

Will newspaper articles and blog posts have to regenerate dynamically, in the event that the person decided to change their identity, to avoid lawsuits over misidentifying a person in public resulting in emotional hurt and damage to reputation?

Of course, the vision of the future you present is probably one few actually desire, but it's interesting to think about why we humans feel such a need to emphasise people's gender all the time. As another poster put it, what if personal pronouns included a reference to race (or age, religion, weight, sexual orientation, etc.) - would we really be comfortable with that? Yet we find gender such an important thing when referring to others.

This is ridiculous and leads to awkward constructions like 'the user might not know that they need to catch that error' when the intended use is obviously singular.

The fair solution is to grep the entire codebase for 'he', 'him', and similarly gendered pronouns, and then randomly replace 50% of them with the corresponding female pronouns. This should be done regularly if desired.

Also, stuff like "using gendered language is hostile" is absolute rubbish. It is not hostile to have a specific instance of gendered language in technical documentation -- it makes it more personal and identifiable. To be fair, this identification can be randomized between male and female.

[EDIT: downvoters, how about my choice to not want to be known as "them" and suchlike? I would like my pronoun to be in the singular form. I am not multiple people.]

I think you would want to avoid switching the gender of the person mid sentence.

Or, determine what the current ratio of 'he' versus 'she' is across all publicly grep'able code and adjust one's own usage so as to cause the average to skew closer to 50/50

One might not know that one needs to catch that error.

We would definitely be in favour of this construction. :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we]

This doesn't solve the problem of offending those who get offended by such things, or feel excluded by the use of a particular pronoun. It just kicks the can down the road because there are people who don't identify as either biological gender, or both, or a third gender, so if this sort of change absolutely must be done then it's better to just switch to a genderless -- if technically inappropriate -- pronoun.

The tone of the exchange on this PR seems pretty bullying & hostile, on both sides. It's why gender "politics", along with politics in general and religion, has become a topic I absolutely will not speak about with people.

I find it sounds more artificial to switch between male and female forms in your documentation than to use the plural forms.

Plus, the plural form actually includes people who don't identify as male or female, and an increasing number of my friends appreciates that.

Honest question, what do they prefer to be known as?

For example, if there is a person called "pat" who prefers to identify as neither male nor female, do they prefer to be called "them" in the third person? Or do they prefer something like "hir" or "zee"? (which are alternate forms as far as I have heard).

I think that if this is a hard problem, it should be solved immediately, without resorting to arbitrary made-up conventions, like using "they" everywhere.

All language is a set of "arbitrary made-up conventions".

The people I know like the 'they/them' form, since it does not sound as made-up as the other words.

I'm not a native speaker, but I agree it happens to me more often that I read past a singular they without noticing than if it were an artificial word like hir.

'they' and 'zie' are both awesome. One of those tends to garner no strange looks too.

You remind me of Dr. Hofstadter's excellent essay on the subject:

"Another suggestion is that the plural pronoun "they" be used in place of the inclusive "whe." This would turn the charming proverb "Whe who laughs last, laughs best" into the bizarre concoction "They who laughs last, laughs best." As if anyone in whis right mind could have thought that the original proverb applied only to the white race! No, we don't need a new pronoun to "liberate" our minds. That's the lazy white's way of solving the pseudoproblem of racism. In any case, it's ungrammatical. The pronoun "they" is a plural pronoun, and it grates on the civilized ear to hear it used to denote only one person. Such a usage, if adopted, would merely promote illiteracy and accelerate the already scandalously rapid nosedive of the average intelligence level in our society."

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

(Worth reading through in its entirety if you have strong feelings on the subject.)

Using they or their in a singular form is a very well-established form in historical and modern usage; the gender-indeterminate form in particular is known as the 'epicene they':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

For instance, there are sections on there using this form by Shakespeare, Austen, Thackeray and Bernard-Shaw.

I actually wonder whether this might be an American thing, along the same lines as the Webster spelling reforms - the wikipedia page says that grammatical prescriptivism over this primarily occurs in America. Personally, I would say your quoted sentence is completely standard English.

Look at the reflexive form in that article.

"Each child feeds themself."

I don't think that singular "they" never be used, just that enforcing its usage everywhere by claiming that the opposite is "hostile" (as this PR seems to lead to) will lead to awkward constructions.

This probably doesn't help feminists with the image problem of being uptight and overly serious.

I am a heterosexual white man, but this kind of comment still makes me bristle. If you had to deal with the casual dismissal of inequity in your particular cohort on a regular basis, you might be "uptight and overly serious," too.

I am a heterosexual man of colour, and I think this sort of artificially enforced "all right, let's remove all traces of individually identifiable references" does absolutely nothing to increase equality between different subgroups.

[side note + example: I really do not understand the term "person of colour" as used in modern American society. To me, it smacks of the old racist term "coloured". But do I still go ahead and use it to refer to myself, because the majority of people understand what I mean.]

The more I think about this issue, the more I recognise that the original github thread did take things a bit far and we all need to be careful not to dive headlong into extreme pedantry. I don't actually think there's anything wrong with using either gender-specific pronoun, but it would be nice if each were used with roughly the same frequency.

[side note: it's quite weird that the comment you're replying to felt the need to bring race into this discussion in the first place]

    it's quite weird that the comment you're
    replying to felt the need to bring race
    into this discussion in the first place

I don't think it's weird at all. I belong to a group given a significant amount of privilege based upon nothing more than the color of my skin, sexual preferences and gender. There are many facets to American cultural normativity, with three of the most important being the ones I listed.

Since we're having a conversation about "uptight" feminists, I thought it was worth establishing that I didn't belong to any group one might normally associate with being "uptight" about that and similar issues.

What if our pronouns were racial instead of gendered? I'd have a problem with the white versions being used in all my technical documentation.

Exactly. But if you go around and look at any tech company, the majority of people are white males. I think changing that actual situation is more important than changing documentation and making yourself feel good about having done something.

If you really want to change things, you can write to your Senator or suchlike about racial inequality you have observed, or immigration reform. That is much harder than just grepping a codebase and submitting a PR -- but if you do it, you might actually effect change (and as a person of colour, I would be much more grateful to you, if you are from a more privileged class).

Of course, doing something to effect greater change is 'better' than doing something that effects lesser change, but that doesn't invalidate doing the thing that effects lesser change. Lesser change is better than no change.

No, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

You grep your codebase of choice for 'him', s/him/them, fire off a pull request, and think "Nice! I really did a lot for the advancement of minorities in tech today!", and then go out for drinks with your mostly white coworkers, where you discuss diversity in the workplace with a straight face.

It's a start. It costs you very little. Do it!

Posting on hacker news an starting a flame war might cost a lot though.

You can do both. And if you do change the documentation, it's not necessarily about making yourself feel good. It can also be about creating a welcoming environment or a host of other things. I'm not attributing the basest motivations to your statements, so please don't do that to mine.

Your suggestion is to do something that will hopefully have some sort of macroscopic impact. That's great and should be done, but it doesn't mean that the microscopic impacts don't matter. I'm concerned about the actual small set of women that I work with on a daily basis not being marginalized.

I take it you don't think there's much of a connection between language and thought. Changing something at the most basic level can have important repercussion. Some prefer this kind of intervention, rather than deal with a political power structure.

Right? Inequality in the workplace will be squashed just like it will everywhere else - with people being awesome to each other. It probably won't happen because of those people refusing to acknowledge differences. Saying 'him' or 'her' in documentation isn't hostile - it's anthropomorphic. I guess in this situation it's an assumption about the user, but why is it hostile?

Next pull request: Convert all usages of the word "history" to "theirstory" :)

[ugh, i'm probably about to get a lot of downvotes for this, which might just prove my point.]

FWIW, the use of singular they as a gender indeterminate pronoun is very well-established, in fact the revisionism is in the movement to cast the form as ungrammatical:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they

This isn't really anything like 'theirstory', which is an artificial construction.

Look at the reflexive form in that article. "Each child feeds themself."

I don't advocate enforcing its usage, I just think it is more appropriate in these circumstances. The reflexive form isn't well established, but I don't think that particularly matters. Languages are messy, and its difficult and futile to enforce prescriptive logic on them. To build upon your example, if you search for the form 'learn for themselves', you'll find that many people use the phrase with nouns which are nominally singular, such as 'this is something that each generation must learn for themselves'. Well, so be it.

I see no problem with it. It's a word I've used my whole life...

Because it's very reasonable and not a problem.

I am a strong supporter of using the singular pronoun 'they' where the gender of the subject is unknown. People who say it is improper english are completely idiotic. It has been widely used in this way for a very long time and specifically as a direct substitute for the opposing trend for at least 30 years now.

That being said, I think it is perfectly reasonably to reject pull requests that only change the wording in a couple of comments and don't have any impact on the implementation /or/ the clarity. They should have added something else of value at the same time imo.

Or they could use one of various invented gender-neutral pronouns, including those listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neu...

These aren't really used at all in real-world English though (at least American English). So the result would be a very awkward phrase and probably a phrase that is understood by fewer people than before.

The technically grammatically-incorrect plural pronouns come off sounding better and in my opinion are the better choice if the use of gender-specific pronouns is an issue that needs to be addressed.

I don't personally mind the use of masculine pronouns to indicate a generic person, because I think there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but in the tech world it's good to be careful as there clearly are gender issues to be sensitive of. I think another good solution to this kind of wording issue is to just use masculine pronouns in some places and feminine pronouns in others.

Yeah, agreed. Singular "they" is the best path forward IMO.

Using obscure and/or not generally understood words when other more common and perfectly valid words exist in common speech is hostile to anyone who isn't a native English speaker. And many that are.

Using those invented words is 'hostile' to more people than any other option.

If the pull request had used one of these I could understand the request being closed, one, they, and them sound much more natural.

Alright. You kids can't just agree to something? Fine! Everyone is now "it".

Thing.

What a waste of time.

Seriously.

And I'm not talking about Node.js.

Hacker News? :)

fwiw, less than 10% of the comments on that page were from women, but ~50% of the human race consists of women. hmm.

How would you suggest we track female lurkers?

As creepily as possible, as is the FB/Google way!

78% of the teaching staff is female at the school my girlfriend teaches at.

Someone should really tell them that this horrible gender balance is a problem and get onto correcting it immediately.

a) 90% > 78% b) if the teaching staff only ever refer to one gender when discussing hypothetical humans then that's probably something they should think about correcting

Not teaching staff. But I have seen children refer to an imaginary teacher as "she". Is that a problem? If so, it should be addressed with as much alacrity as this one.

Fair point - as soon as you bring the innocence of youth into this debate, you pretty much win it :)

I think you're being sarcastic, but yes, if a student uses "he" or "she" for an unknown or abstract person in an essay it would be corrected.

This is a mostly STEM related site. It is well known that women are underrepresented in the STEM community. Further, the majority of college professors are men, but the majority of k-12 educators are women.

A different imbalance, and one to be considered, but separately from this issue.

> This is a mostly STEM related site.

A lot of the material on this site is also related to teaching -- MOOCs, better way to teach science and programming, etc.

> A different imbalance, and one to be considered, but separately from this issue.

Classic misdirection, "oh yeah, we'll look at that later." No, it is intimately related to this issue. If you want perfect uniformity, everywhere is society, you should look at all of these little errors ASAP. The reason why there are so few women in tech is intimately related to gender imbalances elsewhere. So next time you are at a parent-teacher conference or your local nonprofit, make it a point to ask them, "Why do you have so few men? Have you looked at correcting this unfair gender imbalance?"

I wish people would stop making comments like this.

Education departments are well aware of the under representation of men, particularly in primary education, and are trying to fix it (although not doing any better than computing does, unfortunately)

If you work in education, do you hear people telling kids to refer to an imaginary teacher as "she"? (cause kids I know do that).

I know a lot of people who work in the K-12 education sector, and I have never heard them saying that the gender ratio is unfair towards men.

Or one could perhaps just say something like "one could say something like..."

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