Re: Neutral language in W3C specifications

> On Jul 23, 2020, at 6:58, Melanie Richards <Melanie.Richards@microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Leonie and co,
> 
> I want to start off by saying my perspective comes from a cisgendered person with she/her pronouns, and only reflect my particular lived experience.
> 

Hi,

Perspective disclaimer: cisgender he/his here.

> I poked around on the internet about this and found a mix of guidance which suggests either route on hypothetical pronouns could be workable. My personal opinion is that we could suggest spec editors adopt a standard they/them (editors SHOULD?), for the following reasons:
> 
> * they/them feels (again, IMHO) like a fairly inclusive standard pronoun set, and is often used as a default when a person does not know or does not wish to assume someone's gender.
> * Using one pronoun set helps simplify: no need to keep track of the balance.
> * Since as you mentioned these cases are fairly rare, there may not be enough opportunities to equitably represent a range of pronouns (they/them, he/him, she/her, ze/zir, etc) in one spec.
> 
> What seems a common thread across guidance is to write in such a way that no pronouns or gendered terms are needed at all: https://www.mypronouns.org/inclusivelanguage. And we could make that suggestion as well.

I agree In the vast majority of the cases, they/them is the way to go, and we should encourage that practice (which I believe to be already widespread in W3C specs).

I just ran a grep for "his" or "her" on a few specs I work on, and most hits were in the acknowledgement section. For instance "Special thanks goes [...] Melanie Richards for her illustrations of the various alignment keywords." in https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align/. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and using "their" in such cases wouldn't be right. Some people might be OK with it, but others would feel misgendered.

So, if PubRules or Bikeshed and Respec are made to warn about uses of gendered pronouns, it would be good to have a way to mark some uses as deliberate, for cases like that.

> Another related topic is the use of placeholder names. Often these tend toward Anglo-centric when used in tech examples, so we could also advise editors to use context-appropriate ungendered nouns instead of person-names, or use something like "Person A" if absolutely necessary.

Are you talking about situations like multi-party scenario involving a functional Alice / Bob / etc? I think the situations where that's the best way to give an example are fairly rare, but when that's the case, it seems to me that using actual names tends to make it easier to keep track of who's who, compared to "Person A" etc. I'd be inclined to be accepting of this practice, especially if kept rare and limited to cases where we need to talk about complex multi-party interactions, as it seems effective. But maybe it's more exclusionary than I realize?

—Florian

Received on Thursday, 23 July 2020 09:09:21 UTC