1

‘‘Male-Female’’ '‘his-hers’ These should be ‘‘Male Female’’ ‘‘hers his’’ Everybody else should start putting these types of gender lists in alphabetical order, rather than the conventional men first. Hopefully 2014 is the year we(women) stop being mowed over by the written and spoken word. To anyone who is thinking or about to say my comment above is petty(and this happens regularly when I post anything about the frequent sexism in the written and spoken word), I would not bother to post this comment if this issue is petty, and thinking it is petty reflects your attitude towards gender equality rather than what is and is not petty. Sadly, I will likely be bullied, for my objections to sexism in the written and spoken word here. It happens often. I have been driven off more discussions than I care to list, for objecting to sexism in the written word, in religion, in cultures… Putting up and shutting up, no matter how degrading something is is a requirement for survival, but unlike jobs, internet forums are safe in the respect that they are a dime a dozen…

2

It depends on how you take it, really.I am pretty sure no wikihow author would write his hers just to be sexist towards women. They write it like that because that’s the internationally followed standard. Conventional writing dictates that you write his hers, for reasons I am not aware of. Sure, you could change that and make it hers his, but what would that achieve? Apart from the obvious fact that hers his sounds much worse verbally than his hers, wouldn’t hers his be sexist towards men by your logic? What name comes first really doesn’t matter. What matters is how you choose to read that.You can blame editors for being sexist all you want, but you can either be a part of the solution or a part of the problem. If you don’t like what you see, wikihow is open to editing. Change it. You might argue that here his makes more sense since it is in alphabetical order, but some things just aren’t meant to be written in alphabetical order. So stop trying to see sexism in everything. Appreciate the goodness. Read the article and absorb the knowledge that it holds. People see what they want to see. You can try to see sexism on places where there is none, but that doesn’t help in eradicating this issue. Just my opinion on the subject

3

@No-Sexism I totally agree with you.

4

Moved to Village Pump and deleted duplicate threads. I don’t think it makes much of a difference, personally, but I see where you’re coming from.:slight_smile:Keep in mind how many articles wikiHow has. Would you like to change all these articles manually? Saying that you’ll be ‘bullied’ for your ideas on wikiHow isn’t quite right, and it’s just an assumption. Nobody is going to ‘bully’ you for your ideas. I don’t think that saying that we’ll call you ‘petty’ is quite right, either. Don’t make random assumptions about our community.:slight_smile:Could it be that you were ‘‘driven off more discussions than I care to list’’ because you made assumptions about communities like you’ve done here? But I think what you’re trying to introduce to wikiHow to Gender Sensitive Language. I’ve considered advising we switch to it, but there’s a few issues. If we change the few you’ve listed, how much more would you like us to change? Man/Person------> individual Freshman------>first-year student Mankind------>people, human beings, humanity Man-made------>machine-made, synthetic The common man------>the average (or ordinary) person To man------>to operate, to cover, to staff Chairman------>chair, chairperson, coordinator Mailman------>mail carrier, letter carrier, postal worker Policeman------>police officer Steward, stewardess------>flight attendant Congressman------>congress person, legislator, representative Dear Sir------>Dear Sir or Madam:, Dear Editor:, Dear Service Representative:, To Whom it May Now, let’s assume you ‘do’ change all these. Are we, now, supposed to sort out which changes are legitimate or not? Here’s what I mean: Manus-Hand-Handle “manage 1560s, probably from It. maneggiare “to handle,” esp. “to control a horse,” from L. manus “hand” (see manual). Influenced by Fr. manège “horsemanship” (earliest English sense was of handling horses), which also was from the Italian. Extended to other objects or business” This is just something I copied and pasted off Dictionary.com . Makes sense, doesn’t it? Man-Manus-Hand-Handle-Handles work. But then we come across people who disagree completely. “Oh sure! It doesn’t come from “he who manages”, Right? Actually it’s all a sexist ploy…it should be person-ager.” Aha! Maybe the word ‘manager’ is in fact sexist! We should change it to:executive, head of department, supervisor, principal, administrator, head, director, managing director, CEO, employer, superintendent, foreman, forewoman, or overseer, right? For us to sort out every single word and then change it would be impossible. So, let’s say that we choose ONLY to change the ones you’ve named. His-Hers and Male-Female Well, hers-his is, in fact, alphabetical. But is google not completely and utterly sexist for giving the example ‘His Honor’ when told to define ‘his’? And for the word ‘hers’ it says ‘his eyes met hers’ for the example! If we go picking apart every single thing whether it is sexist or not, ‘we(women) WILL NOT stop being mowed over by the written and spoken word.’ We will simply have mowed over the English language and forced wikiHow to change articles for no real reason. I’m a woman. I do not feel ‘liberated from the pain spoken word has caused me.’ Like any other post on this thread, this is just my opinion. As far as I know we don’t have any specific rule on this, but I’ll do a double check on the policies when I get a chance.

5

Ah, probably. I wrote that pretty quickly. I’ll switch it, thanks!:slight_smile:

6

Generally you always say his-hers it just sounds better that way. I don’t believe it is been sexist.

7

Man, seriously? Is *THAT* considered sexism? Pffffffft, I don’t have any problem with it and I bet many women out there don’t, as well.

8

@Confusionist – *Clap clap*

9

Okay… so here’s the problem… wikiHow is not written by paid employees. It is written and edited by an all-volunteer group. While we can post guidelines (assuming we can get a community consensus on them first)… we can’t control a volunteer workforce like we might be able to control a paid workforce. It’s like herding cats… everyone working here does so for different motivations and reasons… and if you begin threatening them or being negative toward their work… they just quit working for you and spend their webtime elsewhere. Frankly? I’m less concerned about latent sexism than I am about coherent sentences with decent capitalization and punctuation in the “How To” articles.

10

I don’t see how his/her would be considered sexism, or even an issue, in the first place.

11

If you check out some articles on Gender Sensitive Language, it says that by using ‘his/her’, it makes the male gender seem elitist. I think it’s a stretch, but that’s just me.

12

Does anyone watch George Carlin? You can’t change everything. That would mean calling that thing in the street a person-hole cover. A lady’s man would be a person’s person. Besides, people write “his hers” because it’s international standard, as mentioned right up at the top of this thread. You’re asking us to basically change all the grammar we’ve ever learnt. That’s impossible.

13

This is in essence sexism against/torwards men.

I agree… @Confusionist wonderfully written/said (first reply…)

Yeah… true…

14

I don’t see any problem with editing them to be alphabetical. So “female, male”, “boys, girls”, “hers, his”, “men, women” - seems like an equal number of times each gender is put first, rather than one gender (i.e. male) first *all the time*: an obviously sexist habit or unstated ‘rule’ (though it’s not a rule of grammar at all, as Krazycommando above implied). I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to do things better here. Just because something is what people feel used to (or think “sounds better”) doesn’t make it actually better or fair. Good on you, No Sexism. Though perhaps introducing the idea in a bit of a defensive-sounding way didn’t help. The logistics of trying to impose a rule about it, though, are another thing altogether.

15

We all just answered that above. Keep in mind that it goes both ways, too. Should we start saying ‘Gentlemen and Ladies!’ instead of ‘ladies and gentlemen?’?

16

I am all for sexism and support the movement which regards both genders. Men shouldn’t be taught that women are sexual objects, nor should women be taught to be solely reliant on men. However, if you are offended by wording in an article then I would reconsider what you deem as important in life.

17

To answer Confusionist, it’s not clear what you mean by “answered that”. You took your chance to voice your thoughts & opinions, I am simply taking the opportunity to voice mine - what’s the problem exactly? My comment (like most comments) simply follows on from what’s been written above. And yes, of course it goes both ways, thus “boys and girls”, “men and women”, as stated in my comment. Regarding “ladies and gentlemen”: (1) that’s an idiom, as opposed to just being a matter of word ordering choice, so it performs a slightly different linguistic function, and (2) it’s the one and only exception to the standard habit. It’s also used *much* less frequently than the examples I listed, and is especially unlikely to come up in a wikihow article at all. But sure, if someone wants to write “gentlemen and ladies”, who’s it going to hurt? (Jaob, you might feel differently if the situation was reversed.)

18

I wouldn’t get upset if I saw “hers & his” in writing.

19

I wasn’t clear, sorry. There isn’t a problem, don’t feel like you need to take offence to what I said. The reason we don’t ‘try to do things better here’ as you put it is what we had answered. How do you expect us to get volunteers to make the change without discouraging them from editing? By placing rules that follow common order we’re just stopping people from feeling like they can edit. So, the reason we don’t completely change the method that we write is because even if we could make it a set in stone rule that we had to write articles like No Sexism has proposed, it wouldn’t make sense. We run off volunteers and more rules aren’t going to promote volunteerism. And I agree with Jaob. The wording of an article shouldn’t offend somebody so they feel ‘mowed down’ by the english language.

20

It doesn’t sound right due to us being used to hear it the other way around. But I doubt that a logical person as yourself would actually be offended and feel negative feelings about wording? (Other than maybe feeling that it doesn’t sound right) I doubt you’d scream “sexist” upon seeing it, am I right?