Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Paul Wouters <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2018, Anton Ivanov wrote:

> Err... that is social "science" without a single number on it.

I hope Niels can add "quoting arbitrary words to imply they are not real" to
the list of questionable things not to write in an RFC or community list.

> At the very least quote an article with a statistically significant survey of 
> engineers who have been horribly offended by the use of "master/slave" 
> terminology. I would be interested to see one.

That is not the bar we are looking for. I think we are looking at replacing
words that have unnecessary bad connotations for a (small or big)
group of people, where doing so would not be to the detriment of the
technical specification (beyond an initial easy learning curve)

I don't think the onus is now on proving what a poor job language has
done to for example women. And you asking for more statistics seems like
putting up an unneccessary barrier to improve in an area where we have
nothing to lose if we improve it.

I am sure NASA is even better at longlived discussions and stalemates
than we are, and even they updated their History Program Office style
guide in 2006 to say "references referring to the space program should be
non-gender specific.". And even now, people (and especially journalists)
still refer to "manned flight". And that still partialy contributes to
women astronauts being asked about makeup[1] in 2015.

Paul
https://www.sapiens.org/column/wanderers/outer-space-and-gendered-language/