5 ms·

> My mother taught me to flip all pro-nouns to female There are languages where pronouns are not gender-red, they are neutral and you see the same results. >

• lomnakkus 8y ago
  I think the poster may have meant proper nouns rather than pronouns? (Well, I mean the "builder" part of "Bob the Builder" may need to be flipped in some languages, but I'd assume there aren't that many women named Bob, so...)
• gkya 8y ago
  My native tongue (Turkish) is one language without grammatical gender. Learning languages with it, it was immediately clear to me that that was a problematic thing. Luckily no revolutions are needed, as languages tend to become more analytical and lose grammatical gender progressively. I think that what enabled women to gain many rights and at times actual equality in most societies was/is technology. Before widespread use of advanced technology, we needed actual muscle power to survive, and that was what shaped the societies since hunter gatherers through various stages of agrarian societies. As machines substituted raw muscle power in many areas of production, women could become part of the workforce too. And thus we had a virtuous cycle of more potential and more power, which affected in turn women's rights and their participation in many other areas. Since the decades following industrial revolution, they became more and more present steadily in politics, academia, culture, etc., becoming quickly co-protagonists of modern life. Thus, I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people instead of many faux-techie types we see that are promoted as symbols of how feminist a workplace/org is or as figurines to "lure" women into STEM and IT. I really want women to be the change they want. Today, there are few women in FOSS that are famous and revered for their technical skills, actually only Jessica McKellar comes to my mind (and I'm not talking the designer types here). I think they should just force their way in into the building blocks of the ecosystem. As males, what can we do? Well, a Linus-y mailing list turns me as a male (from Turkey where both men and women enjoy casual swearing). So we get rid of it, not only to include more women, but also more men from among the sensible, mature demographic. We also do away with the caricaturising stereotypes. Many people think a programmer is an asocial and overweight nerd living in a cubicle in the morning and isolated in a badly-lit room in the evening/night. So we can just not spread misinformation about us. We also maintain our decency around females, because many weird shit guys do that I read in similar threads here in the past is just straight-out psychopatical and very cringy. Other than that, it's on women to make the decision and pursue the careers. I dream of a world where one's sex is just a biological detail that matters in their amorous affairs and private life. And, futhermore, I know that it's totally possible ATM. It's only a matter of time.
  • repolfx 8y ago
    I tend to agree with everything you say. I'd like to call out this part: I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people instead of many faux-techie types I was surprised to read this, but not totally surprised. I've been wondering when this phenomenon will start to be publicly discussed. I think women faking technical skills to benefit from "women in tech" hype is a really serious problem that isn't discussed anywhere near enough, probably because people are scared of the crazed feminist witch-burning crowd. But women and especially actually technically skilled women need to start addressing it head on. The problem of fake "women in tech" seems to have grown astronomically in the last few years. I've been writing software for decades but I don't remember noticing this even as recently as 2010. It will, eventually, if not strongly discouraged, cause men to quietly and silently start assuming that a western female who claims to be a programmer or claims to be technical is probably lying (10x so if she's attractive!). This risks setting back equality of opportunity in technology, which I think everyone agrees on, by many years. In the past year alone I've encountered perhaps four or five cases of women who exaggerate their technical abilities to the media or others online, to the extent that they're just deliberately deceiving people. One case was a journalist who claimed in her bio she was also a contributor to a somewhat well known open source library, which surprised me because why would you be a low paid journalist on a low traffic tech news site if you had programming skills good enough to take part in that project? Turns out her "contribution" was a single character typo fix in a comment, submitted through the github web UI. Another case involves a woman who was put in charge of a corporate funded open source project and liked to loudly and repeatedly claim to the media that she was a 'hacker' with an interest in machine learning and cloud infrastructure, who hung out and gave talks at hacker conferences. She actually did give a talk at a security conference once: on suicide prevention. She has no program traceable to her anywhere, no history of doing any programming work in the past and no github account despite the project she led being hosted on github. In short, no evidence of these supposed hacker skills are anywhere to be found. She is allowed to make these claims about her skills unchallenged because nobody will criticise a "woman in tech". Of course most cases aren't so blatant. But they add up. It makes total sense for women to do this. Claiming to be technical has become a free pass to jobs, status and wealth and they know nobody will call them on it. Unfortunately in an environment where Damore can't even suggest that men and women are different in ways that cause them to have different interests without getting fired, the far more touchy subject of deliberately deceptive behaviour by women is unlikely to ever come up outside of anonymous forums. The problem will fester until many years have passed and attitudes have become entrenched. Neo-Victorian attitudes may rise again. It could be a terrible pity.