Re: [PATCH] am: counteract gender bias

From: Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 7, 2016, 13:24 UTC
Message-ID: <577E580B.5090000@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160707124943.GA22668@glandium.org>

W dniu 2016-07-07 o 14:49, Mike Hommey pisze:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 01:47:19PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>> Since d1c5f2a (Add git-am, applymbox replacement., 2005-10-07), i.e. for
>> almost 11 years already, we demonstrated our disrespect to the pioneers
>> of software development like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Margaret
>> Hamilton, by pretending that each and every software developer is male
>> ("his_tree"). It appears almost as if we weren't fully aware that the
>> first professional software developers were all female.
>>
>> We know our field to have this unfortunate gender bias that has nothing
>> to do with qualification or biological reasons, and we are very sad
>> about the current gender imbalance of the Git developer community.
>>
>> Let's start changing that by using the variable name "her_tree" for an
>> equal number of years out of fairness, and change to the gender neutral
>> "their_tree" after that.
> 
> You make it sound like the decision to use "his" was conscious and on
> purpose. I doubt that was the case, especially 11 years ago, when these
> issues weren't as publicized. Let's not attribute to malice on part of
> the people who wrote those lines what can be attributed to linguistics.

Also, in all (?) other places we use "ours" and "theirs"; it looks like git-am was a strange exception with "ours" and "his" (also, it was/is inconsistent in using plural vs singular form). Though perhaps it was created before the terminology solidified...

As to why it was not noticed and not fixed: probably no-one worked in this area, thus nobody noticed this (callee just don't care how the parameter is named).

Instead of nebulous "fairness" (i.e., be unfair in other direction), in my opinion it would be better to simply fix the issue, be consistent and use common terminology.

-- 
Jakub Narębski