6 ms·

I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% w

I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. If you tell a group of people that their identity isn't supported by your system, some people will accept that and work around it, some people will be mad at you, and you'll just have to accept that the latter have a good point. You have to stop developing it at some point, so all you can do is try to cover as many people as possible. That said, it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases if you design a system that breaks on things like names with "é", or "ñ", or punctuation; or if you implement gender as a boolean that also determines the user's pronouns.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
In regards to your last line, I feel like we do need to give people some leeway and not assume bigoted intent. Most of the things we can gig people for not implementing nowadays are only recently important in our cultural consciousness. English has traditionally shied away from using accents and one can reasonably assume that if a person signs up for my English language website, they won't be using Chinese characters in their name. As for the boolean determining pronouns thing, I can easily see someone thinking that was a clever implementation before people adopted the idea that there are more than two to be cognizant of. I also think using they/them is only recently considered grammatically acceptable. Going forward, we do want to support the things you mentioned.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Definitely old software that's obviously not getting updated can be forgiven. There's still 16-bit DOS software used in production that harkens from the time when ASCII was all that could be supported. I get it, it sucks when a legacy airline system written in the '70 removes the accent characters from your name but them's the breaks. But if you're designing new software nowadays and your requirements don't include the "new cultural consciousness," you're probably making a big mistake. I've seen software built within the last 5 years fail QA due to not displaying emoji.
- a_shovel 5y ago
  Yeah, it's probably wrong to assume much about a lack of support for Chinese-character names on an English-language website, so I removed that. (But if you don't have a good reason not to, you should support it.) Accents and punctuation are different. There are a lot of English-speaking people whose names don't fit in ASCII. A system that doesn't support them is at the "95% for no effort" stage, if even that.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Bias isn't the same as being bigoted. If when you find out you missed it you go "Oh, crap, you're right! We should fix that" you had a bias. If when you find out you missed it you start to defend why it's fine to not include it (not to admit you should, but maybe you don't have time/it isn't worth the cost), that's the point it's bigoted. It's the difference between making a mistake, and getting defensive that it wasn't a mistake. Per old systems, they all fall under bias; it's only with how do the existing support personnel deal with it that you start looking at bigotry, a "I'm sorry, I know, it's just an old system and we don't have the money to update it" is totally understandable and I would argue okay. Digging in that it's not the system that is at fault but the individual wanting a different pronoun, or the person refusing to pick an anglicized name and start using it everywhere, is bigoted.
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    > If when you find out you missed it you start to defend why it's fine to not include it (not to admit you should, but maybe you don't have time/it isn't worth the cost), that's the point it's bigoted. > > It's the difference between making a mistake, and getting defensive that it wasn't a mistake. I think that definition is pretty good, but it also reveals something about the popular usage of the term "bigot". IIUC, an underlying assumption in the parent comment is a person is at fault for not accommodating the offended party's preferred taxonomy / categories / terminology. That a person is a "bigot" if they see their system's current taxonomy as better or more appropriate. Merriam-Webster's definition is somewhat different [0]: "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices". Note that with MW's definition, either or both persons in that "you missed it" conversation could be labelled a bigot, depending on how obstinately they held onto their views. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot
    - slg 5y ago
      You are skipping over the last two words in the definition. It isn't just holding to their own opinions. It is holding to their "opinions and prejudices". Of the two stances "I want to be referred to by the pronouns of my choosing" and "I want to refer to you be the pronouns I dictate for you" only one of those would qualify as prejudice and therfore that is the stance that qualifies as bigoted.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  > I also think using they/them is only recently considered grammatically acceptable. In general, as a singular gender neutral third person pronoun for a person of unknown, unclear, or unspecified gender, they/them is approximately as old as modern english itself, having been clearly used by one of the earliest practitioners of the language, Shakespeare. What's modern is the idea that it's somehow incorrect to have a pronoun that is both plural and singular, which is funny because 'you' is both singular and plural and people use it every day without incident or confusion. Use for a person of known but not-binary gender is newer than that, but probably older than you think, and neopronouns are actually probably also quite a bit older than you think too.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    For what it's worth, I'm glad they/them is catching on and I use it all the time. Growing up, though, I was taught to use "he or she" / "she or he" in English class and they/them was always used in the context of third person plural. I don't consider it a newfangled thing, but the embrace of it feels new.
    - ziml77 5y ago
      "They" comes off impersonal though. As if you're using it because you don't know their gender. That's why I would much prefer a new word. Something that indicates that you know they are neither he nor she. (In a similar vein I'd also prefer a distinct singular "they" and plural "you") I do know that realistically something like that would never catch on, but I can dream...
      - themadturk 5y ago
        It certainly could; look how quickly the term "Ms." as an alternative to "Miss" or "Mrs." caught on. Though it has antecedents long before the 20th century, the term caught fire in the early 1970s with the first publication of "Ms." magazine and was in widespread usage within ten years. I think the bigger problem is coming up with an accepted alternative; there are several floating around, none of which have had a Ms. magazine moment.
RobertRoberts 5y ago
> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Or whatever level of ignorance to believe that ASCII is good enough without understanding that it cannot be. Etc.
  - RobertRoberts 5y ago
    But what if ASCII is completely sufficient for all the customers I work with? This is where the accusation crosses into unreasonable for me.
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    > The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Could there also be bias in the statement "ASCII is not good enough."?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      I wouldn't call it bias. You can make a claim "I know my use-cases so well that I can guarantee that ASCII will cover it". I'd call that foolishness, not bias.
- silvestrov 5y ago
  Sounds like you have never tried sorting or searching. Where in the alphabet does "ö" or "aa" go? Well, it depends on the language AND the word. Is ø the same as ø? Unicode can encode it in 2 different ways, so you need to normalize all encoding before comparing. Is ø the same as o when searching? For Americans it is, for others not.
implements 5y ago
Are you sure most systems even need to record gender or pronouns? Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant, and if by gender you mean masculine or feminine traits then again (other to the person themselves) it’s largely irrelevant I’d have thought.
- kbelder 5y ago
  In the marketing world, it's vastly predictive of behavior, similar to income level or political party. Men and women tend to have highly significant differences in shopping and purchasing behavior. So, whether they 'need' gender or not, many places 'want' gender.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  Pronouns can be useful in any system that generates text that refers to people in the third person, so makes sense to ask -- but it also makes sense to just let people put in whatever they want unless you are trying to aggregate data from it for marketing purposes, in which case imo you should stop doing that. > Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Half the time a medical form asks you that it's literally just so that cis men won't get mad at you for asking if they're pregnant on a later step. I won't be at all surprised if I get some kind of kneejerk reaction to this statement suggesting that it might be important in an emergency or something, but for the most part that's not really the case, and even where it is, if it's that important (ie. allergy level), it's not sufficient to avoid harm because you will have situations where neither "sex" or "gender" as commonly formulated on these forms will tell you what you really need to know (hormone balance, organ configuration, medical history). Any one of those could be out of alignment with whichever social construct of sexed traits you pick.
  - bko 5y ago
    > Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Sex is incredibly important inside medicine. It's probably the most important distinguishing characteristic when determining how to diagnose and treat someone (maybe weight is more). Here are a few examples: - 99% of breast cancer occurs in women - any diseases affecting the female[male] reproductive systems can only impact women[men] - 4x as many women suffer from osteoporosis - Roughly 70% of those living with autoimmune diseases are female - stomach cancer (2:1 men) oesophageal cancer (3:1 men) liver cancer (2:1 to 4:1 men) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_medicine
quadrifoliate 5y ago
> That said, it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases...if you implement gender as a boolean that also determines the user's pronouns. It is probably revealing of your personal biases that you cannot imagine systems in languages other than English that need to do some of this since multiple parts of the language, including verbs, are necessarily gendered, with a neutral gender usually only reserved for inanimate things. Reference: I happen to speak one such language. Problems like this are just hard due to generations of built-up cultural context and the associated effects. We can and should do better, but there is no need to get overly enthusiastic about accusing people of biases while we are at it.
- feoren 5y ago
  There's a world of difference between "Which of these two options defines your gender identity and sex organs?" and "Which grammatical gender form should we use for words when we talk about you?". The former is a deeply personal question with unclear benefit; the latter is a specific question about how you want the site to do a specific thing it needs to do. (Does it really need to do that? Why exactly are you asking about gender?)
  - EnKopVand 5y ago
    I have an anecdote that I think fits your assumption. It comes from my years in the Danish public sector where some of the systems are many decades old. In Denmark we’re all issued a social security number that is designed in such a way that the last number of it, is odd for males and even for females. To make things short and somewhat anonymous, we had several systems that couldn’t handle people changing the “gender” of their social security number. They could handle you getting a new social security number, but it had to be of the same “gender” as your previous. This makes no real sense, as it’s just a number and all these systems handle both types of numbers. But there we were, and it took us several years to get to a point where we could accommodate an employee changing the “gender” of their social security number. So sometimes, developers do weird things because of their assumptions. Ps. I’ve put “gender” in “”s because I’m unsure what the right word is in English.
  - 5y ago
_448 5y ago
> It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. In the case of name, I read an article sometime back that mentioned the problem of getting people's fullname right. Not everyone has a "first name" and a "last name" distinction. So it is better to just have one field of "fullname" and let people enter it as per their locale and tradition instead of having "first name" and "last name" fields. I think gender also falls in the same category.
- feoren 5y ago
  This is the first "falsehoods programmers believe about X" article I read and what I think kicked off the trend. In fact this GitHub page references the same as "the article that started it all". https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
planetsprite 5y ago
> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases. People make mistakes. I think you're opening a can of worms if you try to conflate a lack of robustness in user experience accessibility with some underlying anti-inclusivity bias.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
> It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. If you tell a group of people that their identity isn't supported by your system, some people will accept that and work around it, some people will be mad at you, and you'll just have to accept that the latter have a good point. You have to stop developing it at some point, so all you can do is try to cover as many people as possible. That’s a pretty big if, which itself reveals a bias. While it’s certainly not going to cover every single identity, the following will likely cover vastly more than added effort: 1. Do you need to ask for the data at all? 2. If 1, do you need to require the data? 3. If 1, unless you have to comply with arbitrary external requirements (eg law), use a free form text field. 4. Test that the text field and accompanying information is accessible to assistive tools. This usually comes for free if you use built in tools. 5. If not 2, affirmatively indicate that entering anything is optional. 6. Ask for feedback on how you can do it better, again making this obviously optional. If the feedback is meaningful (i.e. “I cannot use this”, rather than “I would prefer this be less inclusive”), accommodate it.
a_shovel 5y ago
Looking back at this, yeah, I agree with the criticism that the last line is overly harsh. I try to be lenient to people with unconscious bias, and this doesn't help with that.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

In regards to your last line, I feel like we do need to give people some leeway and not assume bigoted intent. Most of the things we can gig people for not implementing nowadays are only recently important in our cultural consciousness. English has traditionally shied away from using accents and one can reasonably assume that if a person signs up for my English language website, they won't be using Chinese characters in their name. As for the boolean determining pronouns thing, I can easily see someone thinking that was a clever implementation before people adopted the idea that there are more than two to be cognizant of. I also think using they/them is only recently considered grammatically acceptable. Going forward, we do want to support the things you mentioned.

ryandrake 5y ago
Definitely old software that's obviously not getting updated can be forgiven. There's still 16-bit DOS software used in production that harkens from the time when ASCII was all that could be supported. I get it, it sucks when a legacy airline system written in the '70 removes the accent characters from your name but them's the breaks. But if you're designing new software nowadays and your requirements don't include the "new cultural consciousness," you're probably making a big mistake. I've seen software built within the last 5 years fail QA due to not displaying emoji.
a_shovel 5y ago
Yeah, it's probably wrong to assume much about a lack of support for Chinese-character names on an English-language website, so I removed that. (But if you don't have a good reason not to, you should support it.) Accents and punctuation are different. There are a lot of English-speaking people whose names don't fit in ASCII. A system that doesn't support them is at the "95% for no effort" stage, if even that.
lostcolony 5y ago
Bias isn't the same as being bigoted. If when you find out you missed it you go "Oh, crap, you're right! We should fix that" you had a bias. If when you find out you missed it you start to defend why it's fine to not include it (not to admit you should, but maybe you don't have time/it isn't worth the cost), that's the point it's bigoted. It's the difference between making a mistake, and getting defensive that it wasn't a mistake. Per old systems, they all fall under bias; it's only with how do the existing support personnel deal with it that you start looking at bigotry, a "I'm sorry, I know, it's just an old system and we don't have the money to update it" is totally understandable and I would argue okay. Digging in that it's not the system that is at fault but the individual wanting a different pronoun, or the person refusing to pick an anglicized name and start using it everywhere, is bigoted.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  > If when you find out you missed it you start to defend why it's fine to not include it (not to admit you should, but maybe you don't have time/it isn't worth the cost), that's the point it's bigoted. > > It's the difference between making a mistake, and getting defensive that it wasn't a mistake. I think that definition is pretty good, but it also reveals something about the popular usage of the term "bigot". IIUC, an underlying assumption in the parent comment is a person is at fault for not accommodating the offended party's preferred taxonomy / categories / terminology. That a person is a "bigot" if they see their system's current taxonomy as better or more appropriate. Merriam-Webster's definition is somewhat different [0]: "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices". Note that with MW's definition, either or both persons in that "you missed it" conversation could be labelled a bigot, depending on how obstinately they held onto their views. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot
  - slg 5y ago
    You are skipping over the last two words in the definition. It isn't just holding to their own opinions. It is holding to their "opinions and prejudices". Of the two stances "I want to be referred to by the pronouns of my choosing" and "I want to refer to you be the pronouns I dictate for you" only one of those would qualify as prejudice and therfore that is the stance that qualifies as bigoted.
stormbrew 5y ago
> I also think using they/them is only recently considered grammatically acceptable. In general, as a singular gender neutral third person pronoun for a person of unknown, unclear, or unspecified gender, they/them is approximately as old as modern english itself, having been clearly used by one of the earliest practitioners of the language, Shakespeare. What's modern is the idea that it's somehow incorrect to have a pronoun that is both plural and singular, which is funny because 'you' is both singular and plural and people use it every day without incident or confusion. Use for a person of known but not-binary gender is newer than that, but probably older than you think, and neopronouns are actually probably also quite a bit older than you think too.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm glad they/them is catching on and I use it all the time. Growing up, though, I was taught to use "he or she" / "she or he" in English class and they/them was always used in the context of third person plural. I don't consider it a newfangled thing, but the embrace of it feels new.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    "They" comes off impersonal though. As if you're using it because you don't know their gender. That's why I would much prefer a new word. Something that indicates that you know they are neither he nor she. (In a similar vein I'd also prefer a distinct singular "they" and plural "you") I do know that realistically something like that would never catch on, but I can dream...
    - themadturk 5y ago
      It certainly could; look how quickly the term "Ms." as an alternative to "Miss" or "Mrs." caught on. Though it has antecedents long before the 20th century, the term caught fire in the early 1970s with the first publication of "Ms." magazine and was in widespread usage within ten years. I think the bigger problem is coming up with an accepted alternative; there are several floating around, none of which have had a Ms. magazine moment.

RobertRoberts 5y ago

> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Or whatever level of ignorance to believe that ASCII is good enough without understanding that it cannot be. Etc.
- RobertRoberts 5y ago
  But what if ASCII is completely sufficient for all the customers I work with? This is where the accusation crosses into unreasonable for me.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  > The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Could there also be bias in the statement "ASCII is not good enough."?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I wouldn't call it bias. You can make a claim "I know my use-cases so well that I can guarantee that ASCII will cover it". I'd call that foolishness, not bias.
silvestrov 5y ago
Sounds like you have never tried sorting or searching. Where in the alphabet does "ö" or "aa" go? Well, it depends on the language AND the word. Is ø the same as ø? Unicode can encode it in 2 different ways, so you need to normalize all encoding before comparing. Is ø the same as o when searching? For Americans it is, for others not.

implements 5y ago

Are you sure most systems even need to record gender or pronouns? Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant, and if by gender you mean masculine or feminine traits then again (other to the person themselves) it’s largely irrelevant I’d have thought.

kbelder 5y ago
In the marketing world, it's vastly predictive of behavior, similar to income level or political party. Men and women tend to have highly significant differences in shopping and purchasing behavior. So, whether they 'need' gender or not, many places 'want' gender.
stormbrew 5y ago
Pronouns can be useful in any system that generates text that refers to people in the third person, so makes sense to ask -- but it also makes sense to just let people put in whatever they want unless you are trying to aggregate data from it for marketing purposes, in which case imo you should stop doing that. > Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Half the time a medical form asks you that it's literally just so that cis men won't get mad at you for asking if they're pregnant on a later step. I won't be at all surprised if I get some kind of kneejerk reaction to this statement suggesting that it might be important in an emergency or something, but for the most part that's not really the case, and even where it is, if it's that important (ie. allergy level), it's not sufficient to avoid harm because you will have situations where neither "sex" or "gender" as commonly formulated on these forms will tell you what you really need to know (hormone balance, organ configuration, medical history). Any one of those could be out of alignment with whichever social construct of sexed traits you pick.
- bko 5y ago
  > Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Sex is incredibly important inside medicine. It's probably the most important distinguishing characteristic when determining how to diagnose and treat someone (maybe weight is more). Here are a few examples: - 99% of breast cancer occurs in women - any diseases affecting the female[male] reproductive systems can only impact women[men] - 4x as many women suffer from osteoporosis - Roughly 70% of those living with autoimmune diseases are female - stomach cancer (2:1 men) oesophageal cancer (3:1 men) liver cancer (2:1 to 4:1 men) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_medicine

quadrifoliate 5y ago

> That said, it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases...if you implement gender as a boolean that also determines the user's pronouns. It is probably revealing of your personal biases that you cannot imagine systems in languages other than English that need to do some of this since multiple parts of the language, including verbs, are necessarily gendered, with a neutral gender usually only reserved for inanimate things. Reference: I happen to speak one such language. Problems like this are just hard due to generations of built-up cultural context and the associated effects. We can and should do better, but there is no need to get overly enthusiastic about accusing people of biases while we are at it.

feoren 5y ago
There's a world of difference between "Which of these two options defines your gender identity and sex organs?" and "Which grammatical gender form should we use for words when we talk about you?". The former is a deeply personal question with unclear benefit; the latter is a specific question about how you want the site to do a specific thing it needs to do. (Does it really need to do that? Why exactly are you asking about gender?)
- EnKopVand 5y ago
  I have an anecdote that I think fits your assumption. It comes from my years in the Danish public sector where some of the systems are many decades old. In Denmark we’re all issued a social security number that is designed in such a way that the last number of it, is odd for males and even for females. To make things short and somewhat anonymous, we had several systems that couldn’t handle people changing the “gender” of their social security number. They could handle you getting a new social security number, but it had to be of the same “gender” as your previous. This makes no real sense, as it’s just a number and all these systems handle both types of numbers. But there we were, and it took us several years to get to a point where we could accommodate an employee changing the “gender” of their social security number. So sometimes, developers do weird things because of their assumptions. Ps. I’ve put “gender” in “”s because I’m unsure what the right word is in English.
- 5y ago

_448 5y ago

> It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. In the case of name, I read an article sometime back that mentioned the problem of getting people's fullname right. Not everyone has a "first name" and a "last name" distinction. So it is better to just have one field of "fullname" and let people enter it as per their locale and tradition instead of having "first name" and "last name" fields. I think gender also falls in the same category.

feoren 5y ago
This is the first "falsehoods programmers believe about X" article I read and what I think kicked off the trend. In fact this GitHub page references the same as "the article that started it all". https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

planetsprite 5y ago

> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases. People make mistakes. I think you're opening a can of worms if you try to conflate a lack of robustness in user experience accessibility with some underlying anti-inclusivity bias.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

> It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. If you tell a group of people that their identity isn't supported by your system, some people will accept that and work around it, some people will be mad at you, and you'll just have to accept that the latter have a good point. You have to stop developing it at some point, so all you can do is try to cover as many people as possible. That’s a pretty big if, which itself reveals a bias. While it’s certainly not going to cover every single identity, the following will likely cover vastly more than added effort: 1. Do you need to ask for the data at all? 2. If 1, do you need to require the data? 3. If 1, unless you have to comply with arbitrary external requirements (eg law), use a free form text field. 4. Test that the text field and accompanying information is accessible to assistive tools. This usually comes for free if you use built in tools. 5. If not 2, affirmatively indicate that entering anything is optional. 6. Ask for feedback on how you can do it better, again making this obviously optional. If the feedback is meaningful (i.e. “I cannot use this”, rather than “I would prefer this be less inclusive”), accommodate it.

a_shovel 5y ago

Looking back at this, yeah, I agree with the criticism that the last line is overly harsh. I try to be lenient to people with unconscious bias, and this doesn't help with that.