

The Power of a Pronoun - signa11
https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

======
malandrew

        "...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.

------
bbitmaster
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
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.

~~~
bbitmaster
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...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615)

 _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._

------
waterlion
Original discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824685)

and here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825924)

------
adamwong246
smh... mountains out of molehills.

