7 ms·

This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor. I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US

• colpabar 4y ago
  >I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures. This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people "below them" how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&I is a grift.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • uoaei 4y ago
    • collegeburner 4y ago
      You raise a good point that there are still real problems that need fixing. But I don't think google docs snarking at me about capitalizing black or eschewing the gender-neutral masculine will help that.
    • alexb_ 4y ago
      DEI is a great system as long as you assume that everyone participates, everyone is completely free of biases, and people actually want it to happen. So you know, it doesn't fucking work.
      • dvtrn 4y ago
        DEI is a great system as long as you assume that everyone participates, everyone is completely free of biases Having been on more than a couple DEI boards, I'm really curious where the notion that everyone must be "completely free of biases" comes from in your mind? I've never understood, and never saw any DEI effort describing bias to be something to be completely, utterly and totally eradicated, but instead something to recognize as a source of potentially--but not always--folly-filled actions ("what happens when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me", etc). Everyone has biases about something or another. Every last one of us. That's why such things as "implicit" vs "explicit" bias exists, and any DEI effort worth its salt should really be making it known that there's a difference between the two.
        • endominus 4y ago
          The argument might then be that because only a small portion of people will be part of DEI boards, and the people on those boards will tend to be biased a certain way (for the same reasons that most liberal arts professors tend not to be Republican) a certain view is consistently presented and a certain course of action is generally followed that affirms the biases of that group of people. Hence the "grift"; as DEI boards become more powerful, they inevitably force a specific culture on the rest of the group.
          • aetherane 4y ago
            The ESG rating group, for instance is a small group of opinionated people with outsized power that can make arbitrary decisions.
    • tmp_anon_22 4y ago
      HR at Activision-Blizzard may have significant D&I initiatives but it categorically does not apply to their CEO Bobby Kotick.
    • jollybean 4y ago
      It's a big assumption to suppose that the 'failing up' guy was only able to do so 'because he was white'. 'Buddies with the execs' - that's easy to believe. But 'because white' ... much harder to convince me there. The amount of easy and assumptive bigotry going on around these things makes me dismissive of all of it unless there's evidence otherwise. Paradoxically, you may have highlighted one of the issues with DEI policies, in that people may be encouraged to perceive their lack of progress up the ladder as somehow 'racially oriented'. This is pernicious, because it's a pyramid and it gets narrow quickly. Everyone has a beef, everyone has a 'reason' for why they aren't at some stage higher than they are, it's the perennial social issue of middle management. So that makes it hard to sort out the legitimate cases where DEI would be relevant, to just the standard 'beefs' that lie just below surface level in every office environment. At about the Director level and above, it's very political and 'talent' is not only just a small part of the equation, but it also means something else at that level. DEI is a really complicated subject, and I suggest 1990's progressives, with a focus on 'treating people equally' or 'equal opportunity' (ideals which are dismissed these days as actually being systematically racist) ... should be the rule. A dude 'failing up' if that's the case, is just unfair all around and that's it. It's 10x more complicated if you step into another cultural context i.e. outside of the US. To the point where I think Google should actively trying to avoid having too much of a posture on anything really. Aside from 'genocide' etc.
    • colpabar 4y ago
      I don't really understand how your anecdote applies to what I said. What you described is nepotism, I don't really think that the guy was not promoted because he was black, and without any evidence of that being the case, I think it's kind of a stretch to assume. Can you provide any examples of why it was about his race? Otherwise, that is just nepotism, like you said.
    • Spooky23 4y ago
      That sounds like bullshit corporate politics. It’s always safer for lousy management to promote idiots to top jobs. Idiots are useful in the sense that you can always get rid of then. The actual mission is secondary.
    • kaczordon 4y ago
      DEI is horrible and returns us back to solely viewing people by the pigment of their skin. The pigment of your skin should be as irrelevant as your hair color, that should be the goal. Also, higher up execs at literally every top tech company(google, Fb, Apple) are aggressively pushing DEI and hiring of minorities. They literally have goals to hire x% of some minority for management positions.
    • raxxorraxor 4y ago
      I prefer to call it DIE. It was always Diversity & Inclusion and now also Equity I guess. Equity is also a shareholders stake, so I am not really sure what is meant here, but it overwhelmingly seems to be this meaning as they are often those that push for such measures. The exalted lords believing to improve life for the peasants.
      • bitwize 4y ago
        Equity means special consideration for marginalized groups to compensate for past oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "A society which has for 300 years done something special against the negro must now do something special for the negro." That should give you some idea of the concept, even if nobody would say that in as many words today.
        • raxxorraxor 4y ago
          I know what it means and what is supposedly meant here, but I think it is quite funny that a very distinct homonym can very well be the same in these instances.
• raxxorraxor 4y ago
  I don't think words need to be gender neutral. Grammatical and biological gender are not really the same. I think this urge to clean languages is a bit detached.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    Personally, I have no skin in the game of gendered language. Sometimes I think it's exaggerated, sometimes I think it's necessary. I do have a hard time changing how I speak, old habits die hard. As far as people and everyday communication is concerned, I address people the way they want to be addressed. Nothing to do with gender, just general politeness. E.g. I wouldn't use a nick name people hate, so why would I insist in calling someone "her" (or "he") if they don't want to?
    • raxxorraxor 4y ago
      I wasn't referring to calling someone another gender. Doing so is just minimum courtesy. I do believe that courtesy cannot be mandated though and I would not want anyone having it mandated for my sake. I meant words like mailman and such. Of course a mailman could also be a woman. I think calling someone a mailwoman is fine, but the word does not carry intrinsic offense.
      • hef19898 4y ago
        We don't disagree, I think. Gender neutral job titles are ok, as far as I'm concerned. Mostly that is, as the female jobs are, historically, more often lower income jobs in the same domain (nurse vs. doctor comes to mind). Coming back to courtesy, if a female mailman prefers to be addressed as mailwoman I would do so. Funny side note, the German language has some interesting edge cases. E.g. the rank of Hauptmann (Captain in the army and air force) usually isn't gendered, the other ranks aren't neither. So usually female soldiers of that rank are addressed as Frau Hauptmann. The funny thing is Hauptmann is also last name... The plural of the rank Hauptmann is gender neutral again, it's Hauptleute...
      • johnny22 4y ago
• jotm 4y ago
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    > (P.S. If the words in this comment offend you, you're missing the point of this thread :D) Could be the political term 'cancel culture' you brought up. That really only gets used in one direction.
    • uoaei 4y ago
      • da39a3ee 4y ago
        You don't seem to know what cancel culture refers to. It's not the celebrities you listed. It's women being deplatformed for expressing traditionally feminist positions; it's students calling for biology professors to be fired because the professor teaches that the sexes are fundamentally binary in Homo sapiens.
        • skinnymuch 4y ago
          Traditionally feminist? What could that mean? Is this actually referring to something regressive that isn’t feminist?
          • rayiner 4y ago
            Traditionally feminist as in this famous portion of Planned Parenthood v. Casey: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-744.ZO.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-744.ZO.html > Though abortion is conduct, it does not follow that the State is entitled to proscribe it in all instances. That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society. For the overwhelming majority of women in the world, feminism is still inexplicably intertwined with issues unique to women because they involve pregnancy, birth, raising children, and the vulnerability that comes from differences in physical strength compared to men, etc.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• slg 4y ago
  >Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I think the original point was there is no way for Google not to do this. Sometimes cultures have opposing viewpoints which makes a neutral decision impossible. One obvious example is with displaying disputed borders in Google Maps. Any decision there is going to be political. Lots of people are going to be upset with Google for making the wrong decision regardless of which decisions they make, but I think that anger is misplaced. The real problem is Google has the power to make this decision for too many people. Companies like Google are simply too powerful and need to be broken up.
  • codesternews 4y ago
    There is no reason to put this feature. This is political feature and can be used in many ways and affects other countries and cultres you cant imagine There are second order and third order consequences of having this kind of features. Google should not push their politics and agenda on other countries and cultures. It affects every other country in different ways. In future this kind of feature can be used in many ways we dont know.
    • slg 4y ago
      Well, yes this is a political feature, but your comment leads me to believe I didn't make my point clear enough. Almost every feature is political when you are the size of Google. You may only be objecting to this feature because it goes against your culture. However there are thousands of other decisions that Google has made that support your culture at the expense of some other culture. Many people here are viewing the problem as Google choosing the wrong culture. I am saying we should instead focus on the immense power Google has to force one culture on another culture.
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    If Google is broken up, the decisions of the new smaller companies will still be political. So what would have been achieved?
    • Barrin92 4y ago
• kvetching 4y ago
• morelisp 4y ago
  > There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Your country has a literal caste system, go ahead and pull the other one.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • Macha 4y ago
    There are many countries this could apply to. For example, landlord, as in someone who rents out a property is considered gender neutral here in Ireland. The term landlady exists, but is only used for female publicans, and only rarely, as publican and vintner are both used more frequently in that context. "Guys" is mostly male oriented, but wouldn't be unheard of for a mixed gender group, and similarly "Lads" here is often gender neutral despite it being the most male of working class male stereotypes in the country that is our nearest neighbour.
    • morelisp 4y ago
      Would you say Ireland has no issues with inclusivity? Come on.
      • Macha 4y ago
        Why does e.g. Ireland's poor treatment of the travelling community mean we need to defer to American interpretations of language? Is America such a shining paragon that everyone needs to copy their every action? This is a lazy argument
        • morelisp 4y ago
          I didn't make that argument, though. If the starting position was "America's diversity concerns are not [e.g.] Ireland's concerns" I'm more sympathetic! In fact I think having software that tries to do this is fundamentally broken! But the starting position is always "we don't have any problems here" which is an even lazier, and wrong, argument.
• secondcoming 4y ago
  • akomtu 4y ago
    That works only with downvoters who are fragile. The confident downvoters will downvote confidently and move on.
• bruceb 4y ago
  >I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country). Ask your hetrosexual male friends how many guys they have slept with. I would imagine response will illustrate "guys" is less gender neutral than might think.
  • hunterb123 4y ago
    Context matters. Some locations they use "y'all", some use "you guys". It's gender neutral in that sense. In the sentence you gave, the context wouldn't be gender neutral because you said "slept with". If you enter a room and say hey guys, it's neutral. If it's all girls you could say hey gals, which would be fine, either works. I can't imagine anyone other than liberals that would be offended by a blanket statement of "hey guys". It's really a stupid thing to get hung up on. It's like searching for something to offend you. It doesn't make sense until you realize the goal. What you're doing is creating arbitrary rules to form a kind of censorship via social pressure because you can't censor speech legally.
    • mc32 4y ago
      Women use you guys to refer to a group of other women all the time. As you said context matters.
• Johnny555 4y ago
  This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor. Inclusivity is fine, as long as you're not encouraged to be inclusive? Are you sure you think it's fine? It's certainly fair to say that you feel that inclusivity has gotten out of hand and that it shouldn't change the way we talk. But it seems disingenuous so say that it's "fine", but think it's scary when it's suggested to you.
• dan-robertson 4y ago
  Is the suggestion there actually complaining about landlord being a gendered word? I didn’t even realise that people thought landlord was gendered although I know landlady is a word. Often a landlord is a company, for example. But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.
  • sacrosancty 4y ago
    Sometimes people in my culture treat obviously gendered words as gender-neutral to the point that they re-gender them when they need to be specific. For example "policeman lady", "postman lady" or "men's perfume". So I think the gender-neutralizing of words happens naturally without having to change the word itself, just like your example of landlord becoming gender neutral.
  • jhanschoo 4y ago
    > But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.
• mitchdoogle 4y ago
  Inclusivity is a problem in every country.