"One of the major things we use gender information for on Google+ is for picking gender pronouns - her, his, theirs - when we refer to you. Google is committed to building products that people all over the world use, and in some languages gender is much more deeply part of how sentences are formed than in say, English. Having gender information helps to make Google+ more conversational. If you decide to make your gender private on Google+, we'll to use gender-neutral language to describe you whenever someone else encounters gender-related information about you but doesn't have permission to see your gender. For example, instead of saying 'Greg added you to his circles' or 'Frances added you to her circles', we'll say 'Greg added you to their circles' or 'Frances added you to their circles'. Yes, I know this is grammatically questionable. You don't need to message me about it. We value helping people control their privacy as being much more important than being grammatically perfectly."
I read somewhere that other languages had more neutral gender splits, or simply all-masculine ones, to make things easier for now. So it could be in other languages they had nothing to reverse yet.
Absolutely, but I would be surprised if they didn't have some code in the production version right now to support doubtlessly upcoming translated versions - perhaps not a full blown declension engine, but it seems unlikely they'd go English only at the start and retrofit everything later. The code might not be optimized to just let them do a simple find/replace for English.
In some languages it is much more important than in English, and it would just sound weird for Google pages to refer to you in a gender-neutral way by default.
Any past tense verb in Russian is gender-specific. When you use "worked", "did", the suffix must adhere to the subject of the sentence.
Now, Russian has 3 genders, that includes neutral, but neutral is a gender of its own, not a catch-all case for when things are neither masculine nor feminine. So unless the product completely avoids using verbs in past tense, making the language gender-neutral and natural-souding for Slavic group of languages is pretty much impossible.
I've seen Polish software use "pracował/a" where male and female forms of "worked" are "pracował" and "pracowała", respectively. It's not terribly elegant, however, and things get progressively hairier as you try to gender-neutralize things like an adjective-noun combination ("new student's" would become "nowego ucznia/nowej uczennicy" at the simplest).
No, Dutchies don't like it either. I don't think it's language specific. It probably has something to do with how much machismo or political correctness there is in a culture :-)
By that logic, Americans are probably more upset about this than, say, Nigerians (I assume Nigerian culture(s) are rather less PC than American culture).
Right, but that gender-neutral he only works we're talking about a "generic" or hypothetical someone. You cannot use in (say) Facebook or Google+ for a text referring to a female friend.
In English, some people still use they/their in this case. In Portuguese (and I think Spanish and other major Latin languages) you can't do that.
Many languages have different ways of saying "you" depending on gender. For example, many arabic verbs have suffixes "ak" (you, masc) and "ik" (you, fem). There is no gender-neutral way to directly address someone (there is only masculine and feminine nouns).
PS. I have only rudimentary knowledge of Arabic so any native speakers, forgive me if I'm way off.
In Hebrew, like in Arabic, there are only male and female singular "you" pronouns. Possession and verbs are also gender-specific ("change your password" can only be m or f). Just like English speakers are finding ways to deal with the "he/she" problem, Hebrew speakers are finding ways to deal with this. It's not a real problem.
In Chinese, while he and she is pronounced the same way ("ta"), the writing is different for he 他 and she 她. That's the only difficult part I could think of in Chinese, there are no changing word endings, etc.
In German is should be more difficult, because there is no "their" like in English to replace her and his.
It looks like they will go the messy route in German. (More likely they already have. I’m not even sure whether they were ever using gender appropriate language in the first place.)
Here is how that looks: „Fügen Sie hier eine kleine Beschreibung über sich ein, damit andere wissen, dass sie die/den richtige/n Name erwischt haben.“ (“Put a little about yourself here so people know they've found the correct Name.”)
See those slashes at the end? They just write both and separate the two variants with slashes. An ugly and common solution, I’m not aware of any better solutions in German, though.
No, I can understand some people would want to hide their gender. I was asking why there should be gender-specific language when your very reference is pointing out that people want to hide their gender.
If someone hides their gender and you see posts like Dan who wished to hide their gender would be exposed with "Dan has not filled out his profile yet."
When someone hides their gender, the language used from then on will be neutral. That's what they had to implement - neutral (instead of gender specific language).
