[rewqfdsa]

Let's suppose that most HN readers are men. There's no obvious gender signaling in your username. (It's two letters long, after all.) What's wrong with someone using the male pronoun as a default until being corrected? Do you expect commentators to read a user's profile before choosing a pronoun for that user? That would be a big efficiency loss for no real benefit. It's unfortunate that this default bothers you, but it's not the responsibility of anyone to prevent offense-taking on the part of another.

[Mz]

It doesn't hurt my feelings. It does, however, make it harder for most women to participate here. The correct way to handle it is to either find out my gender or speak as if you do not know what it is instead of assuming I am male. If you do not know my gender, it takes very little effort to speak in a way that admits you do not know it:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-be...

[wtbob]

> The correct way to handle it is to either find out my gender or speak as if you do not know what it is

And the correct way to do the latter, in English, is to use male pronouns. It's different in other languages, no doubt.

[aninhumer]

Using male pronouns for someone who is actually female is offputting regardless of your opinion of "correct" grammar.

There are plenty of ways to speak in a gender neutral way in English that don't involve trying to rationalise using a gender specific pronoun.

My preference is for singular "they". (It's not as clunky as "he or she", and not as confusing for the unfamiliar as "xe" or similar).

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Singular 'they' is just as legitimate an English construction as singular 'you'.

[rewqfdsa]

> It does, however, make it harder for most women to participate here

I've seen many people make this claim, but I haven't seen anyone back it up with evidence. What do you mean by "harder"? Do you mean "more difficult"? In what way?

Right now, I believe claims that tiny linguistic differences create meaningful barriers to female participation in technology are all specious. I could be convinced otherwise, but have seen no evidence that might move me.

> If you do not know my gender, it takes very little effort to speak in a way that admits you do not know it

English is not structured to be gender-neutral. I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.

[aninhumer]

>English is not structured to be gender-neutral. I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.

Using singular they is hardly a "circumlocution", I do it without thinking about it. It's not hard to learn once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.

And it's not a "possibility of offending", it's a "certainty of papercuts". If you habitually use male pronouns you will inevitably refer to women with them, and they will most likely be put off by your apparent assumption.

[rewqfdsa]

> Once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.

I accept responsibility for the content of my speech. I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech. It's not my job to manage their emotional state.

[Mz]

I am the wrong person to say this to you, and I apologize in advance.

My oldest son is not neurotypical. Raising him was a real challenge. When he was 8, he spent 6 weeks psychologically torturing me. He didn't care about my feelings and he found my reactions amusing. Part of what I told him that finally got him to stop was "The point at which you will care about my feelings is the point at which you want something from me and my reply is No. What have you done for me instead of to me here lately?"

You aren't responsible for anyone else's feelings. But if you routinely disrespect and offend people and then defend your right to crap on others instead of apologizing, that will have consequences for you and they won't be ones you will like. Most people are not as forthright as I am. Most people will never tell you "I am turning down your request because of all the times you were inconsiderate, insensitive, etc." They will just tell you No and not explain why.

I will suggest there may be a connection between how frustrated you seem to feel with other people and your general attitude that their feelings are not your problem. If everyone dislikes you, that can very much be a problem for you.

[aninhumer]

>I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech.

If you know some people will be offended by a particular usage and you choose to use it anyway, then you are responsible for the resulting offence, whether you accept it or not.

Sometimes there are benefits which make the offence worthwhile, particularly when the offence is exceptionally uncommon. But using gender specific speech in generic/unknown contexts has no such benefits, and will cause offence fairly often. Singular they is easy and idiomatic, and I don't see any real excuse not to use it, other than laziness.

>It's not my job to manage their emotional state.

No, it's just a nice thing to do.

[jcadam]

> I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.

I thought I had a large vocabulary. These days, it is rare that I have to stop reading an internet post and reach for a dictionary (I mean, figuratively, you know... Google). Anyway, thanks for the new word. I can't wait to work it into casual conversation sometime this week.

[Mz]

Right now, I believe claims that tiny linguistic differences create meaningful barriers to female participation in technology are all specious. I could be convinced otherwise, but have seen no evidence that might move me.

Years ago, I joined an urban planning forum. It had been around for 10 years. It was the most prominent forum of its kind in the world. The majority of members were in Canada or the Continental US. The owner was frustrated that he did not have more of a global membership. He was not very socially savvy. He had explicitly stated his desire to have more international participation. I felt okay with kind of fucking with the group culture to hand him his wish. I was there about 6 months and was not a moderator when membership generally began to rise, but in particular international membership went up.

Part of how that happened:

I was a nightowl living in California, so I was often on late at night, like midnight my time, when it was the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast. Most members were not only living in the East Coast to West Coast time zones of the continental US, they were on the East Coast. It was a professional forum of nerds. So they were there mostly during working hours, 8am to 8pm east coast time (8-5 for east coast and west coast inclusive, since it is 8pm on the east coast when it is 5pm here).

So one of the cultural things going on was that if anyone was there during the evening or weekend, they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours. It was clear to my mind that this was a barrier to participation for anyone living outside of those time zones -- that potential international members would already be self conscious about being "different" and they would be online during their normal work hours, which were outside that 8-8 east coast timeframe. So the ugly comments about how terrible it was to post outside of those times was something I actively hunted down and fucked with. I threw it in everyone's face that I was there after midnight, that I was a woman and a student and so on (ie I emphasized that I was demographically different from the predominantly male employed professionals to help make foreigners more comfortable with being different). I was the only person having real time conversation with our one active Australian member when it all began.

That changed. I successfully killed the "I am here outside those hours, so I must be a lozer" meme and International membership went up.

I cannot "prove" that me going after that small linguistic detail directly caused it. I can tell you the forum existed for 10 years before I arrived. The forum owner had bitched for years about his desire to have more international members. Six months after I joined, international membership went up. I set it as a goal to make it happen as a gift to the forum owner since I felt he was doing good work and had explicitly expressed a desire for it.

So I believe strongly that I am right. I am also, as far as I can tell, the highest ranked woman here in terms of karma score, apparently by quite a stretch. So perhaps I know something about how to make that work here, if you want to believe my performance is in some way indicative that I know what I am talking about. Or you can do what a great many people do to me and wave it off as "luck" or "coincidence" or whatever and not indicative that my mental models have any kind of sound basis. That gets done to me quite a lot.

[rewqfdsa]

You have an anecdote. I don't know the timeframe for the events you described, but it's a widespread international connectivity to the internet developed much later outside the US than it did inside it, so all things being equal, I suspect there were simply more international participants available during your tenure than during the previous years.

This experience may have convinced you that language policing is effective, but it doesn't convince me. Bragging about your karma likewise has no effect on my evaluation of the merits of your argument.

> That gets done to me quite a lot.

It happens to everyone a lot. In context, I get the feeling that you're suggesting it happens to you because you're a woman. Am I wrong? These sly implications of sexism where none really exist are extremely offensive and offputting and make me less likely to sympathize with your cause.

[Mz]

Well, you are, in fact, dismissing it as merely coincidence, as I predicted.

Nor did I say it gets done to me because I am a woman. It does get done to me a lot. I don't know that it has anything to do with my gender. It may have more to do with the fact that I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology and I have well developed mental models for how these things work that most people are not very familiar with. Since social psychology is a "soft science," it is much harder to convince people that X is true than, say, for physics or math. That doesn't mean there are not studies or established principles, etc, to call upon for drawing conclusions.

Anyway, I have work to do and this seems fruitless, alas.

Have a good day.

[rewqfdsa]

Yes, I am dismissing your anecdote as mere coincidence. I can't justify on an intellectual basis doing anything else. Am I supposed to just listen and believe?

> I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology

Your continuing reliance on credentials isn't helping your credibility.

[belovedeagle]

> they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours.

How is this a "small linguistic detail"? It has nothing whatsoever to do with using 'he' as a gender-neutral pronoun; it's on a completely different level.

[Mz]

They did not think it was a big deal. It was self deprecating humor, aimed at themselves. It certainly wasn't intended to imply anything about anyone else. If I had tried to convince people that it was something that was going to make foreigners hesitant to post, I would have been dismissed. I didn't bother to try to convince anyone I was right. I felt that the forum owner's clearly stated desire to have more international members was sufficient "permission" for me to feel a clear conscience about rooting out this "humorous" meme. If you think that meme is clearly a big deal but misgendering women is not, I will suggest you are underestimating the problem regarding use of pronouns.

[belovedeagle]

> misgendering women

You're being dishonest by assuming the answer to the question. I don't believe that using 'he' "misgenders" women at all, because it doesn't.