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Re: Comment on introduction pages


From: Mike Frysinger
Subject: Re: Comment on introduction pages
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 14:15:04 -0400
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On Friday, June 04, 2010 03:24:34 Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> On 4 Jun 2010, at 13:47, Christina Gratorp wrote:
> > For the comfort of
> > hermaphrodites I think "the developer's" is a good suggestion. Redundancy
> > is not as bad as people feeling sad for not belonging, right? Gary, you
> > seem to be a girl of great humor and mathematical asberger's and since
> > about 1,7 of the world's population are hermaphrodites you with your
> > amazing skills can easily calculate that 98,3 % is better than 90%.
> 
> Well, I was referring to (an assumed) approximate 90% male demographic of
> automake manual readers.  I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the
> slightest clue as to the world population of hermaphrodites.
> 
> > And then maybe we should
> > ponder the fact that so few women are participating to open source. I
> > think "because of Garys".
> 
> It was actually my female English-Lit professor who said to the class
> (paraphrasing from memory): "I would *far* rather be addressed as 'Dear
> Sir', than 'Dear Sir/Madam'... I find the assumption that I am an
> hermaphrodite to be far more ridiculous than the assumption that I am a
> man.  The entire `Sir/Madam', `he/she', `him/her', `person-hole',
> `person-go fruit' movement is ridiculous in the extreme.  If you ever
> submit a paper that panders to it, I will fail you."
> 
> And I agree with that sentiment whole-heartedly.
> 
> The reason that there are relatively few women participating in open
> source is because there are relatively few women active in the Science
> and IT fields.  Absolutely not because open source manuals make the
> entirely realistic assumption that most of their readers are male.
> Furthermore, the idea that ruining the perfectly good English of those
> manuals with a plethora of `he/she', `him/her' sillinesses will
> encourage more women to participate in open source is even more hand
> wavy than my guess at the automake manual reader population demographic.

Gary expressed it better than i would have ever spent time on, especially 
given the last paragraph ;)
-mike

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