I was wading through kernel code the other day when I found this comment in idr.c:
You can pass this id to a user for him to pass back at a later time.
My feminist side was a little irked by the use of "him". It implies that the only user of this function must be men. English speakers tend to use the word "he" or "him" when the gender is ambiguous. It's common because in the past only men were educated and our language is slow to change. I started wondering, how would the Linux community react to someone submitting patches to gender neutralize code?
It's not a big deal, on the surface. It's akin to removing extra whitespace or cleaning up spelling, which some kernel janitors do. Like those tasks, it's a lot of thankless work. So why would it be worth it?
Our preconceptions of what we can and cannot do start with language. When someone is told, over and over again, that they cannot be an engineer or a ballerina, they may start to be believe it. People also get discouraged when all the literature surrounding the field implicitly assumes they are of the opposite gender. We'd look twice at a statistics book that talks about the chances of getting an ineffective pill in a batch of birth control pills. However, most people wouldn't even pause when reading the source code above because we think that men are more likely to be programmers.
A while ago, I was talking with a Boeing engineering at OSCON about the lack of t-shirts for women at the conference booths. He said something along the lines of, "There's just not that many of you around." My response to that is if the community doesn't make room for women, they will continue to be the exception.
Of course, some people might argue that by the time a woman reads kernel code or participates in an open source convention, it's likely that she's already decided to be a programmer despite societal expectations. However, as someone who is just getting involved in kernel hacking, it's still a little intimidating that there is an implicit gender bias. Heck, it was even intimidating to go to my first "Kernel beering" because society implies beer is not a girl's drink.
There are many subtle ways that the engineering community in general, and the open source community specifically, can make women feel welcome. It starts with language. If we can't explicitly tell women that the open source community is not a boy's club, at the very least, we shouldn't implicitly exclude them from the community with the use of gendered terms.