In my mind, this comment
is suggesting that gender specific terms should be avoided. I do not know how the community feels. The comment itself was flagged by a user as offensive (which seems extreme to me). Are terms like "man-hours" acceptable, or should we be holding ourselves to a higher standard?
I am in favor of encouraging clarity above all else, and leaving other matters of language and style up to the author of the post.
As long as the language of the post is clear and it is consistent with the be nice policy, we should let authors express themselves as they prefer. If you don't like gender-specific terms or pronouns, don't use them in your own posts, but don't insist that others refrain from using them.
Gendered terms are bad, but I don't think we have adequate tools at hand for policing or otherwise creating a culture change for this. If you are reading this, I would suggest you refrain from using them totally ("man-hours", "he" when unspecified, "you guys", etc.), but I don't believe there's much more for anyone to do other than leading by example. I'm open to ideas though.
As for why I think gendered terms are bad: I do not say man-hours. There are women on my team. It is quite simply an incorrect term and I'm pedantic enough of a grammarian to end the question right there. Many in industry go through unconscious bias training where we experience the physical cognitive strain that comes in connecting "woman" and "scientist" in the same sentence (the number of people who feel no such strain is frighteningly small). Hofstadter's satire paper on the argument is the best evidence I know that gendered pronouns and default terms are harmful. I really can't write a conventional persuasive argument on the topic better than he illustrates it in this satirically-voiced essay, so I simply won't.
How much vigilante policing we should do via comments is another question, and I think the answer is not much. I would actually really like to hear a solution that helps us de-gender our Q&A besides comments that tend to pester and look more like (or are just indistinguishable from) trolling. The status quo is a bit unfortunate, but I don't see the available tools for policing being productive at all.
I think using many gender specific terms like "man-hours" is fine.
We should strive to use the more gender neutral ones where we can (e.g., "firefighter" over "fireman"), but I don't think we need to explicitly avoid words that are well understood and are normally not considered to be offensive.
"man-hours" is not actually gender specifc. "man" is synonymous to "person", "worker" here.
Think about "mankind". That's everybody.
Imagine a female firefighter saying "I'm not a fireman!" as if it were an insult. Half her colleagues will feel slightly insulted. Fat lot of good that'll do for gender equality.
It's even worse in languages like French or German, where the "feminists" put a female form with gender-specific article next to the old one with a male grammatical gender. Now no macho captain has to suffer that a female can carry the same title, because she's not a "Kapitän", she's a "Kapitänin"! Congratulations, you've made it easy for people to be sexist.
How can I, as a male, stand up for women's equality, say that it doesn't matter in professional life, when all the time people come up with new vocabulary that cements differences? Honestly, I'm rather fed up with it.
Given the increasing acceptance of "singular they," there are very few places where using a gendered term is actually necessary. Furthermore, I do think that avoiding them is good practice for an inclusive community, as otherwise we are contributing with no good reason to the still-quite-strong "men are the default" environment. Of course, when one is talking about a specific person where the gender is known, it's always appropriate to use that person's preferred pronoun.
As for how to approach is as a community: I would recommend treating unnecessary gendering just like we do blatant grammatical errors. If you notice it, edit to fix; no special criticism necessary.
Thus, if you run into a sentence like:
Somebody can told me figuring how many man-hours project need?
just change it to a better one like:
Can somebody tell me how to figure out how many person-hours a project needs?
to fix it and move on.
