4 ms·

Sexism Isn't Simple (2013)

18 points by peri 12y ago

idiotclock 12y ago
Thank you for this brief and calm comment on the delicacy of politesse.
- peri 12y ago
  Glad you enjoyed it. It's really difficult for me to share writing about this stuff publicly.
entreat 12y ago
> being polite and welcoming can help. It doesn't cost much, and it's a positive first step. Except, unless you're a naturally benevolent person (most people aren't), being polite usually does cost something, even if that something is a bit of time and brain cycles. The cost also stacks, and paradoxically increases as your project grows from your niceness. In the course of business, that politeness is paid for with money in the form of risk of churn. Yet for much of open source, nobody is paying or incensing the maintainer to be polite and "considerate". Asking a volunteer FOSS maintainer to be polite is more or less asking for free work, on top of the free work they're doing by giving you software. I actually think the problem of sexism, discrimination, and unwelcoming in FOSS is intimately tied to the fact that most FOSS is not meaningfully being paid for by its users.
- peri 12y ago
  Being polite costs me a lot. I have to keep HN on aggressive noprocrast settings or I will never finish anything. I'm lucky enough to be at a stage in my career where I can do that. Wasn't always this way.
DangerousPie 12y ago
I don't know the details of this case, but is anybody else a bit shocked by this quote from Joyent? > to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me They justify this by arguing that "that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software". Is it really that impossible to believe that someone would just prefer gendered pronouns for stylistic reasons? I find it quite scary that you apparently can't risk having an opinion on something like this without committing a fireable offense in some peoples' eyes.
- billyhoffman 12y ago
  From a stylistic perspective, it is challenging to write gender neutral pronouns. In English, the third person singular pronouns are he, she, it. However, using "it" sounds very strange since it is often used as pronoun for objects, not for people. You might say: "The user does an action. Next, he cooks lunch." Saying "The user does an action. Next, it cooks lunch" is odd. A common workaround is to use "they" as a 3rd person gender neutral singular pronoun. "The user does an action, Next they cooks lunch." But this is even more odd and confusing, since they is a 3rd person plural pronoun. So you have to alter the verb to match, and you get "The user does an action. Next, they cook lunch." This is turn can change the meaning of your sentence, because you really don't mean 2 or more users. You are talking about a single user. I have always struggled with this myself and am never really sure what to do. My default is to alternate between "he" and "she"
  - peri 12y ago
    Personally, I think this varies very heavily depending on the language that you're writing in. I'm not fluent in EFIGS or Japanese without dictionaries, but the pronouns I use in English, French, and Japanese are quite different. Personally, I suggest having professional translators deal with your documentation if you are having trouble expressing yourself clearly in multiple languages. But then again, I also think you should have professionals dealing with anything having to do with copyright assignment and translation, period. YMMV I suppose, but on my end the usual IANALTANSTAAFL&EIIWTINFLA&cetera disclamers for things that I post publicly.
  - chrismcb 12y ago
    Alternating between he and she is very confusing and breaks the flow. Are you discussing two different people, or the same person.
  - mcphage 12y ago
    > they is a 3rd person plural pronoun I don't know why people keep repeating this. The usage of 3rd person singular "they" is older than the modern English language itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they. In other words, it is correct, and has always been correct. If your English teacher told you differently, they were either mistaken or lying.
sambeau 12y ago
The problem here is that if we don't try to change things - nothing will get changed. Our language is currently sexist by default and if we don't try to change that it will remain sexist by default. Why would anyone not want to change that? It's beyond me. If our language was racist by default we would rightly want to change it. "To operate the vehicle a white man should insert his white man's key into the ignition and turn clockwise..." It looks crazy. But that's the world we inhabit for gendered language. I'm not a woman but I would be livid if every time someone made a concerted effort to remove gendered language someone reverted it on 'principle'. I'd be calling for people's heads let alone their jobs! I don't think it's much to ask for us to try to fix this. If we can't do it from the top down, what is wrong with attempting to do it from the bottom up?
- ryanlol 12y ago
  That's nonsense, English isn't sexist by default. It's only sexist if you decide to make it so, e.g. by intentionally misinterpreting it.
  - sambeau 12y ago
    The problem with that argument is that sexism is subjective and it is up to those being discriminated against to decide what is a discriminatory act, not the perpetrators. There is no deliberate misinterpretation. The fact that there are so many women who find our default use of male gender in English discriminatory is proof of discrimination - whether deliberate or not. You can't just wave it away as "nonsense". It is such a simple thing to change - and it hurts no-one to do it. Why wouldn't we just do it if only to make those people happy?
    - ryanlol 12y ago
      Are those the same women that refuse to identify as "women" and use terms such as "womyn" instead?
      - sambeau 12y ago
peri 12y ago
OP here. I'm not bringing this up to reopen old wounds — I talked with antirez privately after this happened and I think we both learned a lot. But I do think it's a good reminder, now that students are coming back to campuses and getting back online again, that things that you say hastily can stick around the internet a lot longer than you'd like. I'm relatively lucky in that most of my weird computer experiments were in the 90s when the demoscene was pretty active. Even without policy changes to the CFAA or DMCA, it takes a very delicate hand to guide students. Those of us who teach, publicly or privately, have a serious responsibility here to make sure we're dealing with subtle linguistic issues even in documentation or comments.
- mdisraeli 12y ago
  Thanks for the additional context, both for the importance of the repost, and in general regarding this incident. As a woman working in tech, I was understandably very upset about the whole affair. I'm very much glad that actual outreach happened behind the scenes, and learning of this makes me feel safe to be part of certain communities again.
UnGravitas 12y ago
I always find this parody amusing and educational when discussing the "is a default gendered pronoun sexist?" thing. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
- peri 12y ago
  That wasn't parody the first two dozen times I read it in the 80s and 90s, alas

18 points by peri 12y ago

idiotclock 12y ago

Thank you for this brief and calm comment on the delicacy of politesse.

peri 12y ago
Glad you enjoyed it. It's really difficult for me to share writing about this stuff publicly.

entreat 12y ago

> being polite and welcoming can help. It doesn't cost much, and it's a positive first step. Except, unless you're a naturally benevolent person (most people aren't), being polite usually does cost something, even if that something is a bit of time and brain cycles. The cost also stacks, and paradoxically increases as your project grows from your niceness. In the course of business, that politeness is paid for with money in the form of risk of churn. Yet for much of open source, nobody is paying or incensing the maintainer to be polite and "considerate". Asking a volunteer FOSS maintainer to be polite is more or less asking for free work, on top of the free work they're doing by giving you software. I actually think the problem of sexism, discrimination, and unwelcoming in FOSS is intimately tied to the fact that most FOSS is not meaningfully being paid for by its users.

peri 12y ago
Being polite costs me a lot. I have to keep HN on aggressive noprocrast settings or I will never finish anything. I'm lucky enough to be at a stage in my career where I can do that. Wasn't always this way.

DangerousPie 12y ago

I don't know the details of this case, but is anybody else a bit shocked by this quote from Joyent? > to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me They justify this by arguing that "that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software". Is it really that impossible to believe that someone would just prefer gendered pronouns for stylistic reasons? I find it quite scary that you apparently can't risk having an opinion on something like this without committing a fireable offense in some peoples' eyes.

billyhoffman 12y ago
From a stylistic perspective, it is challenging to write gender neutral pronouns. In English, the third person singular pronouns are he, she, it. However, using "it" sounds very strange since it is often used as pronoun for objects, not for people. You might say: "The user does an action. Next, he cooks lunch." Saying "The user does an action. Next, it cooks lunch" is odd. A common workaround is to use "they" as a 3rd person gender neutral singular pronoun. "The user does an action, Next they cooks lunch." But this is even more odd and confusing, since they is a 3rd person plural pronoun. So you have to alter the verb to match, and you get "The user does an action. Next, they cook lunch." This is turn can change the meaning of your sentence, because you really don't mean 2 or more users. You are talking about a single user. I have always struggled with this myself and am never really sure what to do. My default is to alternate between "he" and "she"
- peri 12y ago
  Personally, I think this varies very heavily depending on the language that you're writing in. I'm not fluent in EFIGS or Japanese without dictionaries, but the pronouns I use in English, French, and Japanese are quite different. Personally, I suggest having professional translators deal with your documentation if you are having trouble expressing yourself clearly in multiple languages. But then again, I also think you should have professionals dealing with anything having to do with copyright assignment and translation, period. YMMV I suppose, but on my end the usual IANALTANSTAAFL&EIIWTINFLA&cetera disclamers for things that I post publicly.
- chrismcb 12y ago
  Alternating between he and she is very confusing and breaks the flow. Are you discussing two different people, or the same person.
- mcphage 12y ago
  > they is a 3rd person plural pronoun I don't know why people keep repeating this. The usage of 3rd person singular "they" is older than the modern English language itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they. In other words, it is correct, and has always been correct. If your English teacher told you differently, they were either mistaken or lying.

sambeau 12y ago

The problem here is that if we don't try to change things - nothing will get changed. Our language is currently sexist by default and if we don't try to change that it will remain sexist by default. Why would anyone not want to change that? It's beyond me. If our language was racist by default we would rightly want to change it. "To operate the vehicle a white man should insert his white man's key into the ignition and turn clockwise..." It looks crazy. But that's the world we inhabit for gendered language. I'm not a woman but I would be livid if every time someone made a concerted effort to remove gendered language someone reverted it on 'principle'. I'd be calling for people's heads let alone their jobs! I don't think it's much to ask for us to try to fix this. If we can't do it from the top down, what is wrong with attempting to do it from the bottom up?

ryanlol 12y ago
That's nonsense, English isn't sexist by default. It's only sexist if you decide to make it so, e.g. by intentionally misinterpreting it.
- sambeau 12y ago
  The problem with that argument is that sexism is subjective and it is up to those being discriminated against to decide what is a discriminatory act, not the perpetrators. There is no deliberate misinterpretation. The fact that there are so many women who find our default use of male gender in English discriminatory is proof of discrimination - whether deliberate or not. You can't just wave it away as "nonsense". It is such a simple thing to change - and it hurts no-one to do it. Why wouldn't we just do it if only to make those people happy?
  - ryanlol 12y ago
    Are those the same women that refuse to identify as "women" and use terms such as "womyn" instead?
    - sambeau 12y ago

peri 12y ago

OP here. I'm not bringing this up to reopen old wounds — I talked with antirez privately after this happened and I think we both learned a lot. But I do think it's a good reminder, now that students are coming back to campuses and getting back online again, that things that you say hastily can stick around the internet a lot longer than you'd like. I'm relatively lucky in that most of my weird computer experiments were in the 90s when the demoscene was pretty active. Even without policy changes to the CFAA or DMCA, it takes a very delicate hand to guide students. Those of us who teach, publicly or privately, have a serious responsibility here to make sure we're dealing with subtle linguistic issues even in documentation or comments.

mdisraeli 12y ago
Thanks for the additional context, both for the importance of the repost, and in general regarding this incident. As a woman working in tech, I was understandably very upset about the whole affair. I'm very much glad that actual outreach happened behind the scenes, and learning of this makes me feel safe to be part of certain communities again.

UnGravitas 12y ago

I always find this parody amusing and educational when discussing the "is a default gendered pronoun sexist?" thing. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

peri 12y ago
That wasn't parody the first two dozen times I read it in the 80s and 90s, alas