Hi Frank,
I want to emphasize that. IME, except for political environments there isn't any awareness of such problems in most parts of the population, so please don't expect it in a bunch of male geeks (it took me about six or seven months after beginning of my involvement in Debian to notice a female developer and I looked (not too intensive) for them, today the visibility is much higher). Also please notice that it makes (at least to me) a difference that many of us are writing texts in a language that isn't our mother tongue. I usually spot things like this in German texts (due to excessive training in political comittees) but I miss them in English ones (perhaps because I have to concentrate on other things).
I can understand people having difficulty if writing things not in their native language. However the English in that particular document was perfect, as far as I can tell. So that wasn't the problem, I think. I expect it has a lot more to do with the prevailing culture in this community, which is something everyone here is probably already aware of. This is some of the stuff we would like to see changing. :)
In reaction to http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/08/msg00072.html I got at least one personal mail that urged me not to do this...
There's really nothing nice I can say about that. I hope you got more suggesting that you change it.
If there is a consensus on this list to ask for a change please file a bug against www.debian.org, best with a list of offending pages (most of them should not contain texts where the problem occours). Further discussion about the technical solution can then discussed there.
Well I am happy to file the bug, unless someone else wants to do it. Helen.