
Hacking inclusion by customizing a Slack bot - Symbiote
https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customizing-a-slack-bot/
======
js2
I am sensitive to this and never use "guys" when sending an email. So you can
imagine my surprise a few years back when I overheard a female teenage soccer
player address her female teammates during a scrimmage with "hey guys...".

edit: just asked my 14 y/o (going on 30) daughter. She regularly uses "guys"
to address her girl friends and went so far as saying "what am I supposed to
call them? Gals? Girls? That sounds wierd."

edit 2: wife states she'd use "guys" to address a group of women.

Background: raised in Miami by northern parents, currently residing in NC.
Wife raised all over (airforce brat). I'm not immune to using "y'all," but
"all y'all" is a bridge too far.

~~~
britta
"Guys" as a fairly neutral term for a mixed-gender group of people or group of
women is a very very informal usage; it makes sense that a group of really
close friends might choose to use it with each other in a casual and
affectionate way.

The idea of the bot is to be mindful of gendered language when talking to your
coworkers in your workplace, which is a different and slightly more formal
context.

~~~
js2
No disagreement there.

------
pionar
Interestingly enough, if you look up guy in a dictionary[0], definition #2 is:

> Usually, guys. Informal. persons of either sex; people: > Could one of you
> guys help me with this?

My former (female) boss used to address the mixed-gender team as guys quite
often.

[0][http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/guy](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/guy)

~~~
kruffin
As an additional data point, a former client (female) addressed our mixed-
gender team as gals. This is something the article explicitly calls out as
taboo. It didn't bother me (male) at all nor did it seem to alienate anyone on
the team. Disclaimer: I use "guys" as mixed gender a lot and this slack bot
would really piss me off; the opposite of "valuing, respecting, and supporting
the needs of every individual".

------
archimedespi
Interestingly enough, people tend to think that "guys" as referring to a group
is gender-neutral: [http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-
guys/](http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/).

 _disclaimer: this is probably skewed by the particular cohort that Julia
Evans was able to survey._

------
mgraczyk
Maybe it's a regional thing, but I certainly don't consider "guys" to be
gender specific. If I were talking about a group of exclusively males, I would
say "boys" or "men".

~~~
archimedespi
Or, in some regions and in colloquial conversation with a group of male
friends, "dudes".

~~~
pshaw
I heard three young women refer to each other as "dude" in the Portland
airport a week ago. It seems to be a generational thing.

------
trynumber9
This is stupid to people from the Midwest. We've been using "you guys" as the
plural of you for quite some time and, in the examples listed, most of us
would say it has no gender.

------
douglance
How is publicly shaming someone for using a colloquial term inclusive?

~~~
Buetol
Would be more efficient as a private message from the bot: No public shaming,
no noise.

------
redwards510
When I was a teenager back in the 90s, one of the first people I met online
was a bulimic girl from Indiana with a distorted view of her body. I was
interested in programming and taught myself to write scripts for the Windows
IRC client mIRC. She would constantly mention how "fat" she thought she was. I
would always dutifully respond "No, you aren't fat", naively thinking that
might help her condition.

One day I decided to automate this process. I created an event handler when
the word "fat" was said that would perform /msg $$1 "no, you aren't fat".
However, I failed to add a variable delay in seconds, so it was quickly
obvious to her that it was automated. She was a smart woman, so she wrote a
simple loop like:

while(1) { /msg redwards510 fat }

and executed it. This would cause us both to instantly get disconnected due to
"Excess Flood". I decided to disable it after that.

------
a_puppy
This is mostly about social signalling. The presence of the bot conspicuously
telling people not to use the term "guys" signals to both men and women on the
team that influential people on the team are feminist. So what matters isn't
whether or not "guys" is technically a valid term for a mixed-gender group;
what matters is that the ban on "guys" will be interpreted as feminist.

------
placeybordeaux
> This ensures that every person feels comfortable to be themselves at work,
> and it improves the quality of work our team produces.

Interesting thesis, has this turned out to be true?

An okay (not great) way to test this would be to only turn that on in certain
channels.

------
jamescun
I would say it is an inclusive term, and in my experience, used frequently as
such by people of all genders.

There is a lot that can be done in tech to progress towards gender
inclusivity, however publicly calling out use of words which historically
conveyed exclusivity yet nomoreso detracts from more effective means.

------
brandonmenc
Just about every single female I know uses "guys" gender-neutrally. Most
insidious.

------
nitsky
robots enforcing political correctness. scary.

~~~
JBReefer
Government built robots, at that

------
placeybordeaux
I am strongly in favor of switching over to y'all, but then again I came from
the south.

~~~
wslack
I learned "y'all" in grammar class. English was invented without a 2nd person
plural pronoun, so the South fixed it for y'all.

~~~
ihnorton
I know this might hurt y'all's pride, but yous can't claim to be the only ones
to have done so.

------
farnsworth
Specifics about 'guys' aside, I like the idea, and there's a library that
would probably help to implement more rules -
[http://alexjs.com/](http://alexjs.com/). There are a few text editor plugins
using this library to basically lint your document with suggestions like using
'their' instead of 'his' in ambiguous situations and so on.

------
pixelkicker
These guys are wasting taxpayer dollars.

~~~
wslack
I work at 18F, but am speaking for myself. It takes about a minute to add a
Slackbot response, and posting the article helps us attract better candidates
by showing our commitment to a good working environment.

~~~
kookiekrak
I would argue that this article may actually harm your efforts at attracting
better candidates.

The slackbot responses are equivalent to public shaming for using a widely
accepted gender neutral phrase to address a group of people.

This makes 18F seem like a highly PC environment to work in.

~~~
JBReefer
Yeah, I would never work there after reading this. This makes it look like a
place where passive-aggressively policing behavior is common.

I'm not even one to say racist or do sexist things! This just smells ...
bitchy I guess?

------
throwaway999888
I would find such a bot REALLY annoying. And I have a hard time imagining how
others would not, unless they had already tried to put themselves on a _guy_
-less diet.

Since this is a post about "how we work", I would imagine that I would
initially get really annoyed, and then be reminded by how it is just a front
for social pressure from colleagues/higher-ups. Then when someone asks about
how such a reminder has been working for me, I'd just say _Great! Really kept
me on my toes, such an effective reminder._ ...

Not that I even use "guys" that much in any case (or _English_ in daily
life!).

