Bug#678712: developers-reference: Please make developers reference gender neutral
Le Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 09:00:53PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog a écrit :
>
> On Sat, 23 Jun 2012, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Attached is a corrected patch, which fixes the verb agreement issue above
> > and makes a few other tweaks (e.g., not introducing passive tense where it's
> > not needed, which is worse than the original problem it aims to fix), and
> > also catches a few more gender-specific pronouns that were overlooked.
>
> Thank you Steve and Per for this patch. I applied it.
Hello everybody,
yesterday I decided to wait before posting my answer to Steve and Cyril, in
order to have more chances to read more opinions. I guess that the take home
message is that, like on debian-devel, one should better jump on the keyboard
before it is too late. I also would like to add that it is a bit of a slippery
slope to use "seconded" statements as votes instead of indications that the
discussion has ended on a conclusion, as it is done with the Policy, where this
method originates.
Anyway, my point was that the URLs pointed by Steve and Cyril clearly indicate
that the use of "they" instead of "he" is not uniform. In the spirit of our
efforts for software standardization, I would like to propose that the
Developers Reference references which style it follows, first to acknowledge
that there is more than one way to do it, and second to indicate that what way
to consistently follow within this document.
More in the detail, I am not particularly convinced by URLs given by Steve and
Cyril. First, Wikipedia is often either over-emphasizing controversial points
of view in the goal of being fair, or in contrary overly biased in articles
that are made ad-hoc to support one cause (like the neurotypes). Second, the
book cited by Steve, while rogue PDF copies exist on Internet, is not open
access, and the "Cambridge" in the name does not seem to imply any endorsement
by the university of Cambridge.
I did a bit of research on my side, and found some guidelines on the U.S
National Institutes of Health, where the use of the singular "they" is
not mentionned among the solutions to the problem.
Other ways to handle this problem are to recast a sentence in the plural,
reword to eliminate gender problems, or replace the masculine pronoun with
“one” or “you”.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK993/#A243
(Funnily, I also found an article reporting that the use of the singular
they was more difficult (http://pubmed.gov/17455052), but one single
work is not enough to draw solid conclusions)
With the people to whom I talk everyday at work, the trend that I see is that
masculine words are becoming neutral, like "guys" in "you guys", which I hear
used by women adressing to women. To my knowledge, nobody here is using the
singular they. I think that therefore it is a matter of choice and the
important is to be consistent across the document, so please mention somewhere
what standard the Developers Reference is following.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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