Diversity on the governance teams

[Licenser]

Hi everyone, I did open GH issue regarding the PR regarding the gender-change in the dining philosophers quote because I was a bit concerned about parts of it and was asked to express my worries here.

The full text is in the issue but I’ll quickly summarize it. The problem with switching to anything but gender neutral pronouns is that it is a move form something (not adopting a quote) that probably can be seen from anything between OK at best to ignorant at worst to something (enforcing a specific gender) where a knowing decision to be non inclusive was been made. There are people out there who do identify with neither the male nor female gender, if we node move from male pronouns to female ones we repeat the same mistake made before just towards a different group of people. Admittedly a much smaller one then females but none the less an existing one, and frankly the goal of considering the gender of pronouns is to be inclusive so the size of a group should not matter.

[lambda]

There is quite a wide variance in gender identity and gender expression, and there are people who fall in the middle of, or outside the gender binary, or reject it altogether. However, there are a large number of people who do participate in it, both cis and trans, and of those, there is a very large disparity between the number of people who identify as women (and thus generally use feminine pronouns) and those who are involved in the project. There is already substantial weight, in the form of the contributor lists and the team roster, that can put off people from trying to join, as it may appear to be exclusive, or at the very least the case that with such a high proportion of men, that even if it is not actively exclusive, there would be a greater chance that the team and community would not be sensitive to the needs of women who do join.

Anyhow, I think way too much (virtual) ink has been spilled over the choice of a handful of pronouns in the documentation. Whatever choice is made on the documentation phrasing, it’s but a drop in the bucket in terms of actual outreach.

[hanna-kruppe]

The purpose of feminine, gender-neutral, or mixed pronouns is not to match exactly how the reader would like to be referred to. The reader is not mentioned in third person, but rather in the all-concealing second person and first person plural (“we”). The purpose is to acknowledge and reinforce that the subjects don’t need to be male (regardless of whether this convention, known in German as Generisches Maskulinum actually tries to imply anything about sex or gender).

This minority is truly tiny. Most gay people, trans men and trans women identify as either male or female. Many people critical of the gender binary and in favor of pronouns like “xir” still personally identify as one or the other. Some people who don’t identify as either simply don’t care and use either pronoun. “Fluid” people don’t fully identify as either but often use one of the two temporarily. The list goes on. The people who actually mind seeing “he” or “she” referring to other people are an even smaller subset. Proportionally representing them among the unspecified people that are referred to in the documentation would amount to … zero non-binary people, I’d wager.

In that light, having strong opinions about extending the same consideration to the tiny minority that would actually feel excluded by different pronouns seems a bit excessive to me. It’s probably nice for the occasional non-binary entity visiting the docs, but they life their lifes, hopefully very happily, encountering so, so, so many people who are correctly called “he” and “she”. Tripping over ourselves to counteract that would be a curiosity, not a signal that we’ll respect everyone’s pronouns. They survive in a 99% gender-binary-enamored world, they will survive seeing pronouns other than their own referring to a couple of third parties in the documentation.

Note that I am not saying singular they shouldn’t be considered (I don’t really have a preference — I will oppose “xir” etc. though), I’m only saying that bringing accusations of exclusion is quite a stretch.

[MTRust]

So, this is the first time I actually feel somewhat down while reading a Rust thread.

I am coming to this from a position of a minority group, (a disabled person with English as my 3rd language) and my own opinion on this is that while there certainly needs to be a lot of effort in building a diverse community for Rust, I don’t feel like that is something that that any member of the Rust core, moderation or whatever team is trying to “shrug under the rug” in any way.

As someone who watched Rust grow to what it is today for more than a year, I had many interactions with various members of the community and not once have I felt that they are in any way unwelcoming or non-inclusive. They’ve been the nicest group of people I’ve dealt with online and Rust has the first community I actually feel like an integral part of.

Now, I don’t want this to sound like I am just brushing this off or anything, I am just trying to say that people need to not assume malice where there is none. Rather, it is a simple act of trying to deliver something as large as a new programming language, package manager and a browser rendering engine within the promised time-frame and at the greatest quality possible with constrained resources.

I also think that the core team was perhaps somewhat under the impression that the community is pretty good at “self-organising” in the sense of welcoming new members to the community, (I certainly think that they are) and if yes, then that’s actually a great thing, I would say.

Look, communities that have had prominent women among them have only benefited from it, see for example all the amazing work Jessica McKellar has been doing in the Python world or Sandi Metz for the Ruby community. It would be truly amazing to have such people in the Rust community too and I am not aware of a particular reason why that shouldn’t happen here.

I realize that some of you have said that you were discharged from getting into Rust, because of the complete lack of women in the core team. Well, I certainly understand your sentiment here, but please don’t go away if you feel that way, instead join the community, contribute and eventually join the core team, if you want to - I really did not see any indication as to why this should not be possible.

You may feel that you don’t want to join, because there simply aren’t women in the community already and that somehow speaks badly of us, but here again, I would just like to repeat to please not assume malice where there is none, otherwise you’ll just be supporting this self-fulfilling prophecy; no women -> I won’t join -> no women -> I won’t join -> no women -> (You see where I am going with this?)

We need more diversity and I’ve been focusing on gender here, but this really goes equally for race, sexual orientation, economic conditions, political stance or any other diversity metric that you want to apply here, my only plea is that if you are a member of a minority, please don’t write us off just because there isn’t more of you, this is not due to bad intention on our part, (although more could certainly have been done), instead join us and make us more diverse!

[stevencrockett]

So I seemed to be the only one that challenged the initial PR, though I was certainly a bit late in doing so. I never had an issue with the specific text regardless of pronouns. If female pronouns were used from the beginning it would have been fine.

It was more that the motivation for the changes as I understood them didn’t align with the actual changes to the text. The PR came up on the grounds of being inclusive, yet non-gendered pronouns seem to be the most inclusive (and at least a few others seem to agree with this from what I understood). I’m bothered by the fact that a minority (however small) is being identified, yet people seem happy to marginalise those people, as though it’s fine to completely disregard any offence that could be taken. Now I don’t claim to know how many people this is, nor can I speak on their behalf and say what they should and shouldn’t take offence to. The sensible choice to me is to rather not speculate about populations and percentages, and instead just take the safest option.

The only argument for keeping the female pronouns specifically seems to be the idea that women will feel more included in the Rust community. Personally, it seems like a noble but completely unrealistic idea that a single page in the documentation could do this (of course, I understand the argument that the little things can add up). On the other hand, someone else (who also posted above) has already taken issue with the decision-making process and the outcome. I don’t know if they represent the community they’re standing up for, but either way it seems like something more concrete to actually base a decision on. Furthermore, the completely dismissive comments made at the end of that issue I found to be disgusting, and in my mind they only reinforce the idea that the path of maximal inclusion should be taken.

[bstrie]

Several people on Github have linked this thread as a place to continue the discussion of gender pronouns in documentation, but I think this deserves a thread of its own rather than adding to this already quite long thread. If you would like to continue commenting in this vein, I would recommend creating a fresh thread and linking it from here so that others may follow.

[Manishearth]

[Moderator hat on]

Agreed. Anybody wishing to comment on the dining philosopher PRs and related issues should start a new thread and link to it here .

We were locking the original PRs/discussions because Github doesn’t give great moderation tools and it’s easier to manage a discussion on Discourse; we redirected to this thread because it seemed like a catch-all for the issue.

However the issue has become contentious and probably should have a dedicated thread if people are still interested in discussing it.

Thanks.

[sferik]

@Manishearth

Agreed. Anybody wishing to comment on the dining philosopher PRs and related issues should start a new thread and link to it here .

I have created a new thread to discuss the specific issue of pronoun policy. If anyone is interested in continuing that thread, please do so there.

[milesrout]

If someone wants to join a governance team they should be evaluated independently of their gender. That is, ignoring someone’s contribution to Rust or discouraging them from contributing to Rust because they are female is awful, as I’m sure we all agree. At the same time, actively seeking out women to fill positions rather than just whoever is most qualified - who in an ideal world would 50% of the time be female - is pretty offensive IMO. It reeks of someone doing it for the sake of it, or worse doing it so they can make blog posts about how diverse Rust is.

Honestly, Rust is, much like the rest of the programming community, already very inclusive. But there is a point at which you’re going too far, and that’s when you start obfuscating documentation to please 0.1% of the population, which will end up alienating people that don’t have any clue what ‘xir’ means. Nor should they have to. Indeed it is also going too far to discriminate against people for not being female, for example.

[skade]

I’m sorry, but this, the relationship of messaging, outreach and the people that end up here as well as the fact that many people disagree with your view on the ideal world and the discrepancy from it in the programming language community has been discussed for 129 posts above you. Many disagree with your position.

[milesrout]

What’s your point? I’m not allowed to give my point of view because people disagree with it? The point of view that is not being represented in the discussion and that people disagree with is THE MOST IMPORTANT point of view to give.

[nightpool]

His point was that if you’re going to make a well-formed argument, then you need to a) find some axioms that you and the person you’re discussing with have in common, and then b) move from there to the point you’re trying to convey, supporting it with evidence. The current consensus in this thread is that most people believe that we should have a diverse core team, and most of the discussion is about proposing certain ways of achieving this. If you’re going to start from a different axiom (“tokenism is bad” strikes me as one that most people here would agree with) and argue to a different position (“we shouldn’t worry too much about having a diverse core team” seems, to me, to be the main argument your post is making) then that’s fine, but you’re making statements without supporting them, in ways most people here disagree with. For example, I don’t think that most people here would agree that “rust is already very inclusive”, or that inclusivity (rather then diversity) should be the end goal of Rust community building.

Also, from a tone perspective, you seem to be leaning towards the aggressive and hyperbolic, which I’m sure is part of what @skade was reacting to. Nobody is suggesting that we’re going to start using ‘xir’ pronouns in the documentation, and saying that core team members are making decisions about Rust governance teams “so that they can make blog posts about how diverse Rust is” doesn’t advance the discussion at all.

[vojtechkral]

@MTRust Thanks for writing all that up, this is exactly how I felt when I first came upon this thread. Except I was a bit too angry and consequently chose blunt words. Nevertheless, this needed to be said and I’m glad someone who’s better at choosing words did so.