Gender neutrality: Not that hard [LWN.net]

Gender neutrality: Not that hard

Posted Jun 9, 2009 2:13 UTC (Tue) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778)
In reply to: Jetpack: Firefox extensions as they should be by RobSeace
Parent article: Jetpack: Firefox extensions as they should be

I strongly prefer gender neutrality, and I think it is worth a little effort. I do understand that especially for non-native speakers, using he/him/his may seem very natural. However, we can fix the problem over time, if we choose to.

In this article, it would have been pretty easy to fix the remaining cases of inadvertent sexism, while remaining grammatically correct. I think some of these would be improvements even aside from the gender issues.

"the user willing to enhance his browser" -> "users willing to enhance their browsers"

"to develop his add-on" -> "to develop an add-on"

"the developer writes some code right in his browser, refreshes a web page to see the effect of his changes in the Jetpack extension code, then continues rewriting his code, and so on" -> "the developer writes some code right in a browser, refreshes a web page to see the effect of the changes in the Jetpack extension code, then continues rewriting the code, and so on"

"the user learns how to write his own GMail notifier" -> "the user learns how to write a GMail notifier"

"the user sees the whole Jetpack extension source code before he installs it" -> "the user sees the whole Jetpack extension source code before choosing to install it"

There may be documents where eliminating he/him/his would be awkward, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. Basically, I look at any inappropriate he/him/his as being a yellow flag that the sentence should be refactored.

By the way, I apologize for not having something to say about the contents of the article itself. I stopped using FireFox a while ago. I guess I'll just say that it seemed to cover the material pretty well.

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You think we have problems?

Posted Jun 9, 2009 4:32 UTC (Tue) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

Here's an excerpt from Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language"

I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

"Gretchen.
Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm.
She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen.
Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm.
It has gone to the opera."

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female -- tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it -- for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

The confusion doesn't seem to have caused the Germans any great hardship. Gender neutrality in English is overblown at best: no reasonable person is going to suppose that female programmers don't exist merely because an article uses 'he' in an impersonal context; nor will someone who habitually thinks of male programmers suddenly revise his mental model because an article uses a plural.

It's useless at best to go around asking writers to contort perfectly good sentences on the account of the dubious idea that changing a pronoun will fix society. I imagine there are countless ways to address inequality that have the twin advantages of being effective and leaving our language intact.

You think we have problems?

Posted Jun 12, 2009 6:47 UTC (Fri) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link]

You display the issue simpler than it is. This problem exists in German as well, for example in law you often write things like: "The actor/actress who uses his/her ..." (except for laws dealing with maternity). And we infrequently discuss simmilar issues like those in earlier comments (for example the German word for university student is "Student" but this is also the male form, so a gender neutral form "Studierender" is often used, although this is strictly speaking not the same).

And as a side note, not all genders are "random" in German. For example the neutral gender of maiden you used in your quote is actually based on a rule. In German words ending with "chen" are denoting small things of something usually "larger", e.g. Brot -> Brötchen (bread -> rolls). Those words are always neutral, independent of the gender of the originating word. The confusing issue here is that girls are small woman (the old, no longer used word in German was "maid") but boys are not called small man. Maybe the inventor of German language did not know if boys really where small man, while he was sure for woman :-))