On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Akkana Peck wrote: > Nori Heikkinen writes: > > Helen Faulkner writes: > > > http://www.debian.org/devel/join/nm-advocate: > > [...] > > > 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! > > I have mixed feelings about it. > > I wish we (=women, feminists) could get past the language thing. > I think we waste a lot of energy and good will on issues like > language and lose momentum for the things that are really important.
I'm no woman, but I would think it can discourage other women to participate in Debian, even more because some texts seem extreme as you say it yourself: > However, the example Helen gave seems fairly extreme: it almost > seems as though the author went out of his (<- masculine pronoun, > I think that's a safe assumption in this case!) way to use gendered > pronouns even when there was no reason for it. Rewriting, as Carla > and Helen have done, to minimize the need for such pronouns seems a > much friendlier approach. <snip> > Anyway, I still think we shouldn't waste a lot of time and emotion > over sexist language. But in cases like the NM pages which seem > to go to great lengths to thrust the masculine pronoun at us, > filing a bug to rewrite it in a more neutral way is worthwhile. I think it is important enough. I think it is as important as localisation. Cheers Luk
