Fans are stoked for a fourth season of Black Mirror, as they should be. The Emmy-award winning series, which shows the dark side of our inevitable future, does an outstanding job of story-telling while encapsulating an entire plot line in a single episode at a time. But Netflix is keeping its cards close to the vest. The streaming giant has yet to announce a release date for Season 4, but… Read More
As YouTube reels from a series of scandals related to its lack of policing around inappropriate content aimed at children, obscene comments on videos of children, horrifying search suggestions, and more, a new app called Jellies has arrived to offer parents a safer way to let their kids watch videos on mobile devices. Jellies was built by Ken Yarmosh, founder of Savvy Apps, which has been… Read More
As I continue my exploration of feminist literature, Iâve become much more aware of pronoun usage.
I realized my default pronoun for writing and speaking has been male gendered. If I thought about pronoun usage in advance, I could alternate and use female gendered pronouns, but when I wasnât paying attention, my default went back to the male pronoun.
I also noticed that much of what I read used male-gendered pronouns as a default. When referring to a specific person, pronoun usage was linked to the person, but whenever the writing referenced a non-specific person, the pronouns were usually male.
Iâve given several talks in the past few months where I consciously decided to use only female-gendered pronouns, except when referring to a specific person (where I then matched the gender of the person.) After these talks, I regularly got positive notes about this, from both women and men, thanking me for doing this.
Some of these talks were about gender issues in tech, but others were about something entirely different, so the positive reactions were instructive to me. I started mentioning this approach, including to several women I respected a lot for their views on gender issues. I specifically asked if my behavior around this was useful. All gave me a resounding yes.
So Iâve decided to try to use female-gendered pronouns as my default in writing and talking for a while and see how it goes. Iâll still occasionally use male-gendered pronouns, but by having the female as the default, I hope to have âherâ appear more frequently.
All of this notwithstanding, I think itâs important to recognize that thereâs an entire generation that is moving quickly past binary pronouns to epicene (or gender-neutral) pronouns. I write this way also and in lots of situations, it works well. But Iâm not ready to shift to it, especially since I have a massive deficit of female-gendered pronouns in my historical writing.
Also published on Medium.
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Entrepreneurs working out of India, or with an interest in India, can hear from some key players about their views of the Indian startup scene, India’s venture capital ecosystem and the India – US...
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