“Females”
July 13, 2007 8:15 am freesoftwareAm I the only one bothered by the habit people in the free software community have to always use “females” or “female developers” when talking about women?
I can’t remember the last time I actually said “female” in conversation – it feels kind of like talking about one’s gluteus maximus instead of saying “arse” or “bum” – vaguely medical, and a little sterile.
July 13th, 2007 at 8:26 am
How about !men 🙂
July 13th, 2007 at 8:27 am
..having said that I just thought about how you would go about saying that out loud: bang men.
Doh. 😐
July 13th, 2007 at 8:46 am
This is called “political correctness” comrade. Everyone, race, creed, sex or colour is equal, we are one proletariat mass, and our only purpose in life is to work and produce (for each other, or ourselves, not the bourgeoisie of course).
We live with a fear of not being “political correct”, social exclusion is today’s gulag, and people will dance around all sorts of words in conversation to avoid becoming an “enemy of the people”.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:03 am
okay, okay, I agree. But what ‘name’ do you then propose? How should we talk about the subject? We shouldn’t? Is it like “design patterns”? A buzzword that is ought to be unspoken? Hidden? Too much eleetism?
I mean, we’re making it harder for ourselves to add these silly ‘social rules’ about word usage. Nevermind the non-English people who want to say something. I already waste quite a lot of my time “inventing” the right terminologies just so that blog readers wont make this argumentation that again something is wrong. Something is too eleet. Something is not .. this not that not .. whatever.
It’s totally not the point. It’s totally a detail. And usually anything that is not the point but used to argument against the blog article, is totally not interesting.
Finally, we’re loosing or time with the wrong things. Let’s invest time in getting things done, rather than invest time in whining about terminologies and words.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Also note that in the item itself, I used “girl”, not “female”. That word was only used in the title. But anyway …
July 13th, 2007 at 9:31 am
simple : when you speak of a man developping for gnome, use the terme “male developer” every-time
it will sound weird very fast. it is the same with “female”.
July 13th, 2007 at 10:51 am
We say male developers, do we not?
July 13th, 2007 at 11:27 am
The linux.com article is also not very well researched as there was a woman doing a presentation. Karine Delvare gave a talk on the topic of “Contributing to Open Source projects”.
July 13th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Phillip: Of course, the terminology does matter, in this context, because you’re setting the tone.
I suggest talking about women in free software the way you talk about women in your life – “girls”, “women”, or just not referring to sex at all and using names. The less of a big deal it is that someone is a woman, the less of a problem it will be to find women who want to develop free software.
July 13th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Well, “women” doesn’t necessarily feel right, since it confers a certain age. Think about if the headline were “men are working on Tinymail!” — it sounds a bit odd, yes? “Girl” isn’t right for the same reason. I agree that “female” doesn’t necessarily roll of the tongue either, but I guess the problem is there isn’t a good dual for the term “guys.” Everything else is either diminutive or overly formal.
July 13th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
If and when the distinction does matter (which is a separate debate!), “female” is absolutely the correct term– “women” isn’t an adjective, so “women developers” is just wrong. (You’d never talk about “men developers”, unless you had a thriving career in the spam industry…)
July 13th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
@Dave Neary: Well, it wasn’t that much about “the females are doing something” as it seems to have been received and interpreted by a lot of the people who read my blog.
In fact I often tell about contributors of Tinymail (go look it up in my blog, I do). I usually say something about the individual. I, for example, in past talked about José Dape, Sergio Villar, Javier, Murray the workhorse (remember? I did that very recently) and about Antia, Antia the girl from Igalia.
This is how I like to deal with software developers who join the team of Tinymail developers: on a personal level.
I enjoy talking about them as-if they are people, with their personal characteristics. Gender is part of that description, right? Antia was not the only person who I in the past discussed, and not the first either. That she’s a female who’s coding in the programming language C actually *is* something that is something special about her personality (like it or not, there are not a lot girls nor woman — yes, I’m avoiding the word “females” now –, who code in C).
It was about Antia and you guys are making this about how I talk about “the great miss of females in our community”. I remember that I once talked with stargirl: that my opinion is that we shouldn’t push these females too hard. That we should let girls be girls, and not try to convert them to boys. etc etc. That we should prepare the environment for them, not force them to work as boys and to compete as boys in a male setting.
I pretty sure we’re on the same level and/or opinion about overreacting about this so called problem (which isn’t that much a problem in my opinion. Well it might be a problem, but a problem that a Darwinism-style of evolution would self-solve automatically).
But really, the blog item was much more about Antia than about female coders in general. It disturbs me a little bit that so many people are trying to find ways to interpret me so that I said the things they wanted me to say wrong.
It’s not really playing fair here. I try to mention the people who work on Tinymail, and for that I get punishment because I used “females” and not “girls”.
I mean, c’mon guys …
If somebody does not like being mentioned for working on Tinymail, this person can most certainly tell me about that. I WILL shut up. Antia, however, did not complain about this. Not at all. In fact I (think I) remember that she came online and thanked me for the mentioning. She might have thanked me for accepting her patch. I forgot the exact content of the quick-chat, sorry.
July 13th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
No-no-no… “Lady.”
It’ll be “Lady developers,” and “Men-folk developers.”
😉
(Honestly, I’m used to the “male developers” and “female developers” language. “Men developers” just doesn’t make sense to me, as well as “women developers.”)
July 13th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
I just find it funny because I’m imagining someone saying “Are there any boys and girls who want to code in C?” It’s just a hilarious idea.
Or “I’ve just met this neat lady developer.”
or “There was this brilliant girl-coder! She haxed the planet!”
I use female when I want to specifically say “female, as opposed to male”. (Instead of “girl, as opposed to boy”.) But otherwise I usually prefer gender ambivalent terms.
July 14th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Use a real language!
One that makes a difference between genres.
Développeurs.
Développeuses.
Isn’t it simple 🙂