The Power of a Pronoun

https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

by signa11 • 13 years ago

12 6 13 years ago

bbitmaster2• 13 years ago

Seriously? Fire someone over rejecting a pull request that modified comments of code to change pronouns somewhere?

Then go on a rant about how this person lacks 'empathy' and should not have a job at your company.

Don't get me wrong, I am for gender neutral pronouns wherever possible. But to advocate firing someone over such a trivial social issue is silly. Maybe this person was concerned with technical issues within the actual code, and could care less about the political correctness surrounding some comments.

fader• 13 years ago

I think the 'firing' comment was over reverting the commit that fixed the gendered pronouns. I.e. this person changed the pronouns back to the gendered version after the non-gendered ones were committed. That is a bit more than the initial rejection of the patch.

bbitmaster2• 13 years ago

actually, that's not what happened at all. Read the response of the guy who rejected it here: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...

Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.

Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.

That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?

Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.

To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?

I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks.

malandrew• 13 years ago

    "...and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: 
    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 and for Joyent. 
    On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to 
    fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that 
    way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of 
    the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), 
    but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be 
    gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one 
    place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably 
    linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent 
    tolerates."

Seriously? You're attributing this insistence to malice without considering another viewpoint: This could be simple grammar nazism from someone who takes a prescriptionist (as opposed to a descriptionist) viewpoint on English grammar. For a very long time, gendered pronouns have been considered the grammatically correct form. Acceptance of gender neutral form is relatively new, maybe one to three decades old in common use. There are other possibilities than this being a case of active overt sexism. At the end of the day, you need to remember that we are in an industry where we all rubberneck at a huge debate over the proper use of the semicolon in Javascript to cite one example.

Gendered pronouns becoming an issue of sexism entered the discussion the same way that the concepts of double negatives entered the English language. Someone simple decided to make a stink about it until everyone believed it. I don't know who was responsible for making gendered pronouns a sexism issue in English, but in the case of double negatives, you can attribute that popular language change to Bishop Robert Lowth, when he published A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes in 1762.

At the end of the day most romance languages are inextricably linked to a linguistic concept of gender, but you don't see any speakers of those languages making a big issue about the political correctness of their mother tongue. Why? Because linguistic gender and sexual gender are extremely weakly related and they are only strongly related in English because a strong relationship has been argued for by people with nothing better to do until it is a popular concept.

waterlion• 13 years ago

Original discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824685

and here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825924

adamwong246• 13 years ago

smh... mountains out of molehills.

The Power of a Pronoun

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