On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 08:28:01PM +0100, Helen Faulkner wrote: > Count the "he"s. I get 13. This doesn't seem to be, based on the stuff > I've been flicking through, particularly unusual. And people wonder why > women find debian unfriendly to them! It's certainly discouraging to me. > > I'm sure that this is not _intended_ to be unfriendly, or even sexist. > Maybe the people who wrote it, don't even realise why using such > language is a problem. But it can't be that hard to automatically go
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). > through the webpages, search for occurances of "he" and change them into > "she/he", and change "him" into "him/her" etc. Does anyone on this > mailing list doubt that such things do matter? 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... > What can we do to get this sort of thing fixed? Preferably quickly :) > I am happy to write to people personally and ask that they fix up such > language when I see it, especially if anyone can suggest who to write > to. But maybe there is a better way to approach the problem. 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. Gruesse, -- Frank Lichtenheld <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www: http://www.djpig.de/
