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Discussion on: Can anyone become a developer?

 
jethet profile image
Jethet

It has become good practice to use 'they' when talking about people in general. So if anyone can do something, they can do it and it is their opportunity to do it.
This may seem like a detail, or nit picking, but what if you would read a text like:
"In the world of tech, developments go fast. Anyone who wants to work there, has to up her game. She will have to work hard to keep her knowledge and her skills relevant, and she will have to invest her time in that". Sounds very different, doesn't it? If you think about how this changes the impression of the audience it is directed at, maybe it means that one half of the audience thinks it is not directed at them.
The national broadcaster in my country has started to look for spokespersons who are female when it comes to interviews for items about government policy, economics, tech, agriculture, whatever. This makes people think, you know. It is almost strange how the 'standard' is male when 51% of the world population is not male. And then I have not even mentioned people who identify with the LGBT+ community!

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belinde profile image
Franco Traversaro

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll try to use the plural form in the future. That didn't cross my mind because in Italian we have different sex form even for plural form, so that doesn't do the trick for us. Using a male form when addressing a group of mixed people isn't just a convention, but a grammar rule, and our grammar is way more strict than the English one. Even the more extreme LGBT activists follow that rule, because we don't have a viable alternative that can be understood by anyone. We should create a new rule, but such a synthetic approach is bound to failure in the real life.