{"id":119,"date":"2015-04-11T21:03:41","date_gmt":"2015-04-12T01:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/?p=119"},"modified":"2015-04-11T21:06:21","modified_gmt":"2015-04-12T01:06:21","slug":"gender-equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/gender-equality\/","title":{"rendered":"Be gender-inclusive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Avoid sexism when marketing your tech product or writing documentation. Despite stereotypes, men are not the only people who use computers.<\/p>\n<p>You can avoid the &#8216;all competent computer users are male&#8217; assumption by:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Using gender-neutral language in your documentation. <strong>Don&#8217;t use &#8216;he&#8217; as a generic pronoun to refer to your users<\/strong> &#8211; instead of saying something like &#8216;a user should go to the Preferences menu to choose <em>his<\/em> settings&#8217;, <strong>rewrite the sentence to be gender-neutral<\/strong>.\u00a0In some languages, using &#8216;he&#8217; as a generic pronoun is typical, but in English, many people consider this offensive or sexist. A good way of doing this is <strong>making the subject of the sentence plural<\/strong>, so it reads &#8216;users should go to the Preferences menu to choose their settings&#8217;. You can also use the <strong>second person<\/strong>: &#8216;you should go to the Preferences menu to choose your settings&#8217;, or use the <strong>singular &#8216;they&#8217;<\/strong> as a gender-neutral pronoun: &#8216;a user should go to the Preferences menu to change their settings&#8217;. NB: some traditionalists object to the singular-they construction, but there&#8217;s nothing wrong with it.<\/li>\n<li>Showing <strong>different kinds of people<\/strong> using your product if you use images to advertise your application or game. Show people of all genders, not just men. Try to make sure there&#8217;s a mixed group of people, so it doesn&#8217;t look like tokenisation where you&#8217;ve got a single woman in a sea of men.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Don&#8217;t use women as your image of a novice or non-technical computer user<\/strong>, like guides that write about &#8216;Linux that your mother can use&#8217;. The Geek Feminism wiki has a <a href=\"http:\/\/geekfeminism.wikia.com\/wiki\/So_simple,_your_mother_could_do_it\">good article<\/a> about avoiding making women the stereotype of novice or non-technical computer users, which is worth a read if you&#8217;re trying to make your website, game, operating system or application more inclusive. There are men who don&#8217;t have a clue what FTP, PHP and Angular are, and there are women who are experts at all those things. Don&#8217;t be sexist and pander to tired, hurtful assumptions about the gender of your users.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Avoid sexism when marketing your tech product or writing documentation. Despite stereotypes, men are not the only people who use computers. You can avoid the &#8216;all competent computer users are male&#8217; assumption by: Using gender-neutral language in your documentation. Don&#8217;t use &#8216;he&#8217; as a generic pronoun to refer to your users &#8211; instead of saying&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/gender-equality\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Be gender-inclusive<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/inclusivetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}