Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S270813AbTHAQPj (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Aug 2003 12:15:39 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S270817AbTHAQPj (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Aug 2003 12:15:39 -0400 Received: from mail.jlokier.co.uk ([81.29.64.88]:3969 "EHLO mail.jlokier.co.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S270813AbTHAQPh (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Aug 2003 12:15:37 -0400 Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 17:15:29 +0100 From: Jamie Lokier To: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Robert Love , "J.A. Magallon" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [OT] Re: [PATCH] protect migration/%d etc from sched_setaffinity Message-ID: <20030801161529.GB12501@mail.jlokier.co.uk> References: <20030731224604.GA24887@tsunami.ccur.com> <1059692548.931.329.camel@localhost> <20030731230635.GA7852@rudolph.ccur.com> <1059693499.786.1.camel@localhost> <20030731231850.GC7378@werewolf.able.es> <1059694637.786.11.camel@localhost> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2701 Lines: 66 Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > So, since administrators come in both sexes, I picked one. > > Except the convention in English is to use the male in that case. > Using the female pronoun tends to distract from the point. That's right. Many words in English come with a conventional gender, based on a conventional gender role assignment: Doctor -> male Carpenter -> male Baker -> male President -> male Nurse -> female Maid -> female Cleaner -> female Prostitute -> female etc. I picked some of the more emotive ones for the above list. It has been shown that then such words are used in stories, without any mention of one gender or the other, nearly everyone assumes that the person so described has the conventional gender for the role. This is not some flimsy, irrelevant observation. The assumption is strong enough that it is very effective at misleading about who is who in a story. (Unfortunately I don't have such a story to hand.) And it most certainly affects who ends up working in which field. There are words which do not have such a strong gender role these days, too. Newsreader, for example, would have been strictly male at one time but not any more. Context matters. Secretary, for example, would depend on whether you mean a secretary in a small business, or a secretary of state. Administrator is another: System Administrator or Network Administrator is quite male (oddly, - as all the sysadmins I know are female), but Office Administration strikes me as assumedly female. As you can see from the latter two examples, a word _itself_ does not imply a linguistic sex. The role is what is significant. Many people don't like the stereotyping, and the (significant) social inequality which is reinforced by this, and choose to do their bit to alter (possibly correct) the collective view of how things are, or ought to be. You're right that it distracts from the point, but then to _not_ distract from the point is to perpetuate social inequality, or something like that... > There are plenty of plural forms that do not imply gender at all. > As in: > > > Yah, I know. But this is a lot of code just to prevent root users from hanging > > themselves, and there are plenty of other ways they can do that. That is the most neutral. Alas, plurals are often that bit more cumbersome and dry. Depends whether you're evoking a reference manual or a personal story, I guess :) -- Jamie - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/