2 ms·

> It's stereotype-reinforcing. Isn't it simply _necessary_ to do such things? Don't we all have to assume the common case whenever someone leaves some detail o

> It's stereotype-reinforcing. Isn't it simply _necessary_ to do such things? Don't we all have to assume the common case whenever someone leaves some detail out, which is of course done all the time? If someone says "they are kicking the ball between each other", I'm going to assume that the ball is round, as is typical for the occasion. That is "stereotype-reinforcing", but could we even avoid it? Would we want to?

braindongle 9y ago
It certainly can be difficult to work around gendered language. The point is to think about it and avoid it when you can. You never met your daughter's surgeon: "I'm sure the surgeon did all he could to help her." "I'm sure the surgeon did all that could be done to help her." Maybe the former expresses your intent better (for some reason?), but why not use the latter? This, of course, is quite aside from what a machine should do in ambiguous cases. In those cases, I just wanted to put a vote in for things like he/she (or: he or she) coming from machines rather than statistics-based presumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language