It seems that with any cause, advocates typically break down into two camps: militant and inclusive.
The militant camp feels the only way to right the wrong they perceive is through positive action and active repression of the repressors. The inclusive camp feels that incremental change that improves the injustice they see will, given enough time, right the wrong without the need for punitive actions.
This has been the case with civil rights (MLK vs Black Panthers), environmentalism (WWF vs GreenPeace), animal rights (ASPCA vs PETA), and on, and on...
If I had to guess, I'd suppose that activists tend to break down along these lines because those they oppose break down in a similar fashion. There will be those who embrace the injustice and actively defend its existence. Then there will be those who don't perceive the injustice, or don't recognize its severity, but are open minded and willing to change.
I point this out, because I think it's useful to recognize these camps and to which you belong. I'm not willing to say one is right and the other is wrong. I suspect both are necessary to some degree. But if you look at the whole discourse in question here, some of the most disheartening exchanges are between individuals on the same side of the issue, but in different camps.
My impression was that the problem with the original post was a denial accepting a change, which the author took to mean a militant exclusion of gender neutral language.
The author wasn't taking a militant stand against someone who simply writes gendered language, but against someone who made a decision to exclude gender-neutral language specifically.
I think the other feature of these two camps is that they tend to see the opposition through the mirror of their own preconceptions. I took the pull request rejection at face value: "trivial change; denied". I don't agree with the policy, but I did not sense any overt anti-gender-parity agenda in the action.
That the author of the pull request viewed this action as a militant attack tells me, with some measure of certainty, to which camp they belong.
It's a matter of degree then. Saying "doing work to change pronouns isn't worth it to me" is one thing - you may find the benefits of that too trivial to be worth your time.
Rejecting (multiple times) work that has already been done for you leans much more in the direction of some sort of agenda.
That's a very interesting point of view. I had never thought of the fact that disheartening exchanges are performed between individuals on the same side, but I guess that's true in many similar discussions...
Wow, the response from Joyent seems ridiculous. Saying you would fire someone (who doesn't even work for you) when you haven't even asked them why they did what they did is stupid. You're overreacting, doing it without full information, and doing it publicly. It seems even worse when you read the response from Ben: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
NB: I don't know much/anything about Joyent/Ben so my perspective is just from what I've read on GitHub and this post.
I don't think Cantrill's "have you ever kissed a girl" had much to do with gender equality [1]. It was just a low, personal attack on someone commenting in explicit, researched detail on Solaris performance, made by someone who was responsible for Solaris's (poor) performance.
[1] Some folk would argue heteronormativity, but that's also a different topic from gender equality.
Sure they can. But they can also learn maturity and to privately inquire as to whether there were any misunderstandings. Certainly, they can refrain from threatening to fire someone - who doesn't even work at their company!
Ben Noordhuis (https://github.com/bnoordhuis) is the #3 contributor to Node.js making 1,315 commits since 2010. Now he is openly called an asshole by a Joyent employee not over introducing critical bugs, but rejecting doc change that has no impact on how people use Nodejs whatsoever.
If political correctness is involved, people often jump to conclusions burning the "offender" at the stake before hearing them. We have not learned from The Enlightenment.
What's crazy is that this particular Joyent employee is a VP of Engineering at Joyent. A person in such a position should have a better feel for PR, in my opinion. By claiming that Ben would be fired at Joyent and by publicly calling him an asshole without even hearing his position, he might've just have his own firing signed.
Unless, Joyent is the new Inquisition in this matter.
Some folk would argue that women reading the node docs (edit: source) would get the idea that Node devs think of themselves as being all male.
(for the record, I would have merged the request, as I like small fixes and think it's a good change, but I think Joyent's lynching of Ben is disgraceful)
If someone doesn't like being called an asshole, they should not act like one.
While the documentation pull request may have been trivial, it was also risk-free. Ben Noordhuis chose to reject a risk free pull request because he doesn't like gender neutral language (instead of ignoring it and let someone else handle it).
I have read the original comment before the shit hit the fan, which clearly shows his attitude:
"Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
Your lik is nothing but personal crisis PR, written after the shit hit the fan.
I don't find his response/explanation so difficult to believe.
Gender neutral language(especially for non-native English speakers) is quite simply not viewed as an important enough issue to warrant retroactive application.
Should it be? Certainly; and while I think it's important that the change be made, and the developer informed about the importance of gender-neutral language in future documentation, I personally think that labeling a core developer of an awesome piece of OSS as a misogynistic asshole without even giving him time to respond publicly is an over-reaction.
It's a sensitive issue that should have been resolved privately.
If the developer actively continued to include gender specific grammar and denied future pull-requests retroactively applying gender neutral language then I think the title of misogynistic asshole would be much more applicable.
One denied pull-request and a revert does not a misogynistic asshole make.(imo)
It's trivial in that's it's small. Ben doesn't say that the matter of gender in computing is trivial.
Personally, I would have clicked the button because documentation is important to me. However a lot of people don't like smaller fixes like that. I don't agree but that doesn't make them bad people.
> 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?
Do you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
In Russian, a simple phrase like "Another bright student has solved the problem" (другая способная студентка решила задачу for female) carries a point to a gender in EVERY word. All the things around one like doors, tables, computers, etc. also possess a gender. Trying to convert Russian phrases to a gender-neutral is almost never possible.
It's the same in german, even to the point where obvious female words do not have a female gender. People have tried for the last 40 years to make the language gender neutral with absolute appalling results. Some gender neutral versions are almost entirely being used for satiric purposes only.
As an example "This is the girl, she is beautiful" in german is "Das ist das Mädchen, es ist wunderschön" usually uses a neutrum pronoun (object). "es" == it because Mädchen is neutrum. That's just how the language works and forcefully changing it results in terrible sentences.
A lot of people have not the slightest idea how languages work, but they FEEL very strongly about the subject. I think the all-time stupidest such idea I've heard is that it's morally wrong for a man to refer to "my wife" because "my" denotes ownership. If you take more than a second to think about that claim (it's not even necessary to look at other languages...), you'll quickly notice that "my" does nothing of the kind; it denotes some sort of relationship (of almost any kind) between you and the specified noun. In the case of "my wife", the relationship is a marriage; in the case of "my picture", it could be ownership... or it could be the fact that you appear in the picture, regardless of who owns it.
In Chinese, pronouns are not distinguished by gender; the third-person pronoun is 他[ta]. In modern written Chinese, however, they are spelled differently by gender. At some point in the recent past, some person of authority innovated the characters 她 and 它 (both, obviously, pronounced ta) to refer to females and nonhumans, in order to more easily translate European literature into Chinese. For whatever reason, they are now considered standard spelling. The twist is that it turns out to be useful sometimes to use gender-neutral language, so when a chinese text is specifically trying to be gender-neutral, instead of using 他, it will often use "TA" (the actual roman characters). I can't help but feel that it's a long, pointless rigmarole to go through in order to arrive where you started from.
(There's also a character 妳, the female equivalent of the second-person pronoun 你, but owing to the inscrutable whims of politics it hasn't caught on in the mainland.)
It's a common situation in a lot of inflected languages--words get suffixed to agree in number, gender, etc. and it's hard to escape "gendering".
What I usually do is construct the sentence to say that a person [has done something, for example], where possible. The word "person" is gender neutral by meaning, so the whole sentence comes out gender neutral in meaning regardless or grammatical gender of words. Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.
> Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.
It's the same in German and the pronoun for "Person" is consequently "sie" which is the female pronoun. Yet everybody thinks of a person as being genderless. Language gender has very little to do with real gender.
Yep. When I said it's interesting, I meant in the context of this controversy, it's gender neutral in meaning and it's grammatically female so it satisfies PC rigour from two sides.
Spanish also has grammatical gender, but it's nowadays fairly common to use gender-neutral constructions, especially in writing and especially for things like occupations. There are different approaches: "profesoras y profesores", "profesores/as", etc. This seems particularly common in the Americas, more than in Spain. In Spain left-wing newspapers will write that way, but in Mexico even non-ideological mass-market papers like El Universal do.
That will probably seem more relevant when someone tries to translate the libuv docs to Russian, or when somebody complains that a Russian sentence should use gender neutral pronouns in some software docs. I don't really think it is relevant right now.
I find it relevant. For a non-native English speaker (Ben, the "offender"), Him or Them seems not as relevant as to the people trying to burn him at stake for the offence.
What this comment about Russian is saying is that these things are very delicate to get right. In some languages even more than in others
If I were a non native speaker faced with a small text edit that I didn't understand the reason for but which many people had just gotten angry about, I would probably not publicly revert it. If Ben wishes to blame his poor English skills (and I have not seen him suggest this, only people hypothesizing on his behalf) then I would suggest he become more aware of his weaknesses and not appoint himself judge of things he doesn't understand.
Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That seems quite reasonable and he admits he didn't understand the point of the request, and that he shouldn't have reverted it. Pretty classy work.
But the thread was immediately derailed in the next comment by some asshole saying he was glad the change didn’t go through, setting off the whole fiasco. It could have been a nice teaching moment, giving Ben a chance to explain his dismissal (which turned out to be logically reasonable if not tactful), followed by an explanation to a non-native speaker the importance of non-gendered pronouns. Instead, as it all too-often does, the situation became a complete shitstorm because some people can’t understand that “hostile” doesn’t require, or even imply, conscious intent. Mens Rights activists need to “lighten up”.
Interestingly, the guys I know who have English as a second language and are developers prefer to use English for all technical documentation. Some even are actively annoyed by those who use their native tongue.
Of course, that's biased by the fact that those people speak English, that's why I can converse with them. I'd be curious to know if this was a majority opinion, or a minority!
The Chinese developers of my acquaintance (mostly) do not speak english, and consequently don't particularly appreciate english documentation. As in your case, the documentation preference is going to be strongly determined by language (in)capability.
But in Russian (as in other Slavic languages) you would use more frequently equivalents to words like 'people', 'nobody' in sentences like these, i.e., when it is not necessary to convey the sex (not grammatical gender). The fact that each noun has a grammatical gender (m/f/n) and verbs/adjectives/etc. tend to take suffixes to reflect these is a totally different thing.
In Russian, when you write "user" - "пользователь", you would definetly write "решил" - "decided (with implicit musculine gender)". That is just how the grammar work in this language. To change that one would not simply replace the pronouns but also transform about 50-60% of other words in a colloquial everyday speech. Changes like this take centuries!
You are missing my point that in languages with explicit grammatical gender of nouns, it is not true that \forall grammatical gender==implied sex, e.g. in Polish if you wrote zegarmistrz (watchmaker, masculin) you would use masculin suffixes for adj/v and you would not imply the sex since there is no feminin counterpart (even if you really tried). In your case, решил probably (I don't speak Russian) inherits the gender from пользователь.
My broader point is that in many languages, which Slavic ones are a subgroup of (but in German as well), there exists a construct that is used when you do not want to imply sex. In English they struggle with the one/he/she/they. And, BTW, in my experience she is more popular than he (e.g. in financial literature bankers are all 'she' even though female bankers are as common as female coders most likely).
"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."
Almost everybody seems to forget that simply merging the pull request is only a temporary solution. It places an additional burden on the developer, who is neither a native English speaker nor necessarily interested in learning a politically correct lingo.
Anybody who comes with such changes should already have proven that they are willing and able to contribute long term to the documentation. This doesn't seem to be the case here.
Writing gender neutral texts is much easier in English than in my native language. So please, don't hide your dislike for gender neutral language behind a pseudo-concern for non-native speakers. I find that quite patronising.
...and what of languages that have no gendered pronouns? For native speakers, constructing a gender neutral sentence in English is considerably more difficult. Your experience does not invalidate the experience of others.
It is certainly not a frequent topic in The Netherlands. Some people will say hij/zij ('he/she') or explicitly use 'zij'. But both feel a bit awkward, because 'hij' (he) has been used in a gender-specific and neutral sense.
The sad part of it all this: "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. "
Joyent - well done - you have shown potential customers to now be wary of becoming too entangled in your products or ecospace, lest they get bitten by the effects of your blog space comments and the ramifications of these.
Joyent - well done - you have shown open source developers you would fire them (how?) before you would establish the facts. Developers - be wary here before you selflessly give your time and effort to these projects.
The lynch mob on the internet - shame on you all. There was no issue here for you to shout and scream about, let alone bring out your virtual portable gallows. What ever happened to benefit of the doubt? For shame. The sad part is that there are real gender issues out there, but instead of spending the time and effort on those, where they do actually exist, you spent it on here, on this, which was more a poor communication at best, a minor issue of lack of respect amongst fellow developers at a stretch, but not, and never a sexism or gender issue.
In fact, Joyent practically did was character assassination. Every time potential future employers will Google Ben Noordhuis' name, they will be wary.
In such cases, the best thing to do first is to talk to the person for clarification. You know, sending an e-mail or giving a phone call. But, apparently it's easier, more beneficial or more fun to destroy a person's reputation.
Ps. I am all in for gender equality and restoring the balance in our field. But I heavily dislike the lynching these days, before even talking to the person and giving him/her the opportunity to apologize if there was indeed a misstep.
The militant camp feels the only way to right the wrong they perceive is through positive action and active repression of the repressors. The inclusive camp feels that incremental change that improves the injustice they see will, given enough time, right the wrong without the need for punitive actions.
This has been the case with civil rights (MLK vs Black Panthers), environmentalism (WWF vs GreenPeace), animal rights (ASPCA vs PETA), and on, and on...
If I had to guess, I'd suppose that activists tend to break down along these lines because those they oppose break down in a similar fashion. There will be those who embrace the injustice and actively defend its existence. Then there will be those who don't perceive the injustice, or don't recognize its severity, but are open minded and willing to change.
I point this out, because I think it's useful to recognize these camps and to which you belong. I'm not willing to say one is right and the other is wrong. I suspect both are necessary to some degree. But if you look at the whole discourse in question here, some of the most disheartening exchanges are between individuals on the same side of the issue, but in different camps.