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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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