Timeline for How to recognize and properly respond to a cat-and-mouse question
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 15, 2018 at 18:22 | vote | accept | Aweygan | ||
| Mar 15, 2018 at 7:31 | comment | added | Jyrki Lahtonen Mod | The English language has singular they as an alternative. It felt a bit awkward at first, but I am becoming more comfortable using the construct.Admittedly I still don't know if I'm using it correctly for people are often too polite to correct a foreigner abusing it. | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 8:53 | comment | added | Aloizio Macedo Mod | Aside from that, as an example, if I work at a store and say Tivemos dois clientes hoje (which is "We had two clients today" in a male variant, with female one being Tivemos duas clientes hoje), no brazilian will assume that I had two male clients (unless my store was gender-specific for some reason). | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 8:50 | comment | added | Aloizio Macedo Mod | To add to Asaf's point, I am Brazilian. Here most nouns have genders associated (for instance, "the user" is o usuário (male) or a usuária (female)) and there is no genderless pronoun, so we use the male one as "indeterminate/unknown" when that is the case. Regardless of the reasons for that, that is how the language is. There are "attempts" to try to circunvent this (there are people who say things like "x usuárix", which would only "work" on a written environment), but trying to change the basis of how a language is structured is very difficult (compare to notation in mathematics). | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 8:22 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | @Greg: And for what it's worth, when I see someone saying something negative about a hypothetical user and using "she" to address that user, I find it more offensive towards the women of mathematics. | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 8:19 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | @Greg: I am pretty sure the majority of users on this site are not native English speakers, who ultimately have an internal monologue in their own native tongues. I find it borderline offensive to ignore that. Yes, we should be receptive towards inclusion, and we should be making less assumptions on people whose gender is unknown. But for crying out loud, most people here speak English as a foreign language. Cut them some slack, would you? (The point being that other languages have this feature regardless to Victorian preferences.) | |
| Mar 5, 2018 at 19:51 | comment | added | Greg Martin | Many of our current English "rules" are the result of intentional prescriptivist grammar choices made in Victorian England, the main effect of which was to keep the upper class separate from other classes. In other words, "a feature of language" often is actually a cultural construct—and thus very much can be the product of bias. Certainly, some grammatical conventions endure while others do not, and those choices are shaped by culture. I choose to promote an inclusive culture, including which of the competing pronoun conventions I use; it sounds like you might agree :) | |
| Mar 5, 2018 at 19:24 | comment | added | user14972 | @GregMartin: I'm pretty sure defaulting to male pronouns is a feature of language, not our biases. It may be part of the reason we have such biases, and that may be good enough reason to find ways to avoid it, but it is not itself the product of bias. | |
| Mar 5, 2018 at 2:36 | comment | added | Greg Martin | I recommend not using the pronoun "he" to refer to a hypothetical user or to a user whose gender is unknown. Defaulting to male pronouns is a symptom of our implicit biases, and using them in these situations also reinforces and perpetuates biases against women in mathematics. | |
| Mar 3, 2018 at 1:01 | history | answered | Aloizio MacedoMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |