3 ms·

Totally agree with your statement that gender issues are a factor in global economics, and that we should strive to use gender-neutral phrasing whenever practic

Totally agree with your statement that gender issues are a factor in global economics, and that we should strive to use gender-neutral phrasing whenever practical.

Danjoe4 3y ago
The euphemisms are insufferable
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I'm actually not someone big on insisting we say "humankind" instead of "mankind" or similar. I did check the link talking about paternalism and I can understand where the practice of using the word that way comes from, but it implicitly smears fatherly behavior and implicitly reinforces an assumption that men have political and economic power and women don't. Gendered language is kind of a thorny issue for the English language. Not all languages are like English. Japanese and Farsi default to gender-neutral pronouns and cultures that default to calling people by their family name instead of their given name also sidestep a lot of these issues. The US had a women-only baseball league during World War II and someone said (or somewhere I read) that it was the era of radio broadcasts and baseball defaults to referring to players by their last names, so listening to a game of baseball with women-only was experientially nearly identical to listening to men's baseball: "And Smith is up to bat and knocks it out of the park for a home run, winning the game!" It's probably a fiercely fought battle with English because it's the default lingua franca for the world and doesn't play well with a lot of cultures that feel forced to use it. Various proposals for fixing it come from interest groups rather than arising naturally in an emergent fashion and strike people as unnatural, top-down solutions to a problem they personally may not have, so see no reason to pursue. /off-topic tangent, oops, because linguistics and social issues are both interests of mine
- constantly 3y ago
  There’s no reason you can’t address a mixed-gender group as something like “hey everyone” or “hey folks” rather than something like “hey guys” or “hey gentlemen.” It’s just common courtesy we should feel a duty to perform it as members of a society, in my humble opinion. The point I was making a couple replies up was that some terms aren’t fungible, like paternalism and maternalism, because also they seem superficially to be different genders for the same topic, they mean totally different things, so we should use paternalism to mean what it means, despite the gender connotation.

Totally agree with your statement that gender issues are a factor in global economics, and that we should strive to use gender-neutral phrasing whenever practical.

Danjoe4 3y ago

The euphemisms are insufferable

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I'm actually not someone big on insisting we say "humankind" instead of "mankind" or similar. I did check the link talking about paternalism and I can understand where the practice of using the word that way comes from, but it implicitly smears fatherly behavior and implicitly reinforces an assumption that men have political and economic power and women don't. Gendered language is kind of a thorny issue for the English language. Not all languages are like English. Japanese and Farsi default to gender-neutral pronouns and cultures that default to calling people by their family name instead of their given name also sidestep a lot of these issues. The US had a women-only baseball league during World War II and someone said (or somewhere I read) that it was the era of radio broadcasts and baseball defaults to referring to players by their last names, so listening to a game of baseball with women-only was experientially nearly identical to listening to men's baseball: "And Smith is up to bat and knocks it out of the park for a home run, winning the game!" It's probably a fiercely fought battle with English because it's the default lingua franca for the world and doesn't play well with a lot of cultures that feel forced to use it. Various proposals for fixing it come from interest groups rather than arising naturally in an emergent fashion and strike people as unnatural, top-down solutions to a problem they personally may not have, so see no reason to pursue. /off-topic tangent, oops, because linguistics and social issues are both interests of mine
constantly 3y ago
There’s no reason you can’t address a mixed-gender group as something like “hey everyone” or “hey folks” rather than something like “hey guys” or “hey gentlemen.” It’s just common courtesy we should feel a duty to perform it as members of a society, in my humble opinion. The point I was making a couple replies up was that some terms aren’t fungible, like paternalism and maternalism, because also they seem superficially to be different genders for the same topic, they mean totally different things, so we should use paternalism to mean what it means, despite the gender connotation.