On Friday, June 04, 2010 03:24:34 Gary V. Vaughan wrote: > On 4 Jun 2010, at 13:47, Christina Gratorp wrote: > > For the comfort of > > hermaphrodites I think "the developer's" is a good suggestion. Redundancy > > is not as bad as people feeling sad for not belonging, right? Gary, you > > seem to be a girl of great humor and mathematical asberger's and since > > about 1,7 of the world's population are hermaphrodites you with your > > amazing skills can easily calculate that 98,3 % is better than 90%. > > Well, I was referring to (an assumed) approximate 90% male demographic of > automake manual readers. I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the > slightest clue as to the world population of hermaphrodites. > > > And then maybe we should > > ponder the fact that so few women are participating to open source. I > > think "because of Garys". > > It was actually my female English-Lit professor who said to the class > (paraphrasing from memory): "I would *far* rather be addressed as 'Dear > Sir', than 'Dear Sir/Madam'... I find the assumption that I am an > hermaphrodite to be far more ridiculous than the assumption that I am a > man. The entire `Sir/Madam', `he/she', `him/her', `person-hole', > `person-go fruit' movement is ridiculous in the extreme. If you ever > submit a paper that panders to it, I will fail you." > > And I agree with that sentiment whole-heartedly. > > The reason that there are relatively few women participating in open > source is because there are relatively few women active in the Science > and IT fields. Absolutely not because open source manuals make the > entirely realistic assumption that most of their readers are male. > Furthermore, the idea that ruining the perfectly good English of those > manuals with a plethora of `he/she', `him/her' sillinesses will > encourage more women to participate in open source is even more hand > wavy than my guess at the automake manual reader population demographic.
Gary expressed it better than i would have ever spent time on, especially given the last paragraph ;) -mike
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