Activists tend to conflate a visible change with a useful change. The problem with tinkering with the language is that you might get (some) people to change the

Activists tend to conflate a visible change with a useful change. The problem with tinkering with the language is that you might get (some) people to change their speech superficially, and you're going to chalk that up as a success. But you have no real notion as to whether it's doing anything productive. We've had a host of gender-neutral terms in professional life for decades now, but when I'm reading stuff on women's issues, I don't get any sense that women feel better off because of this. It's just more linguistic landmines in the workplace. And the article is counting stats on how many women apply. That runs headlong into the fundamental problem with diversity metrics: proportions in an organization not matching proportions in society are by themselves a genuine problem, but it's taken for granted that this means something terribly dire. Then when you do some stuff and those numbers change, you have no idea if it's due to anything you did, or if things are actually better. And you're playing tribal politics, so it's hard to see that "my tribe benefited!" is better for society as a whole.