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“Guys” is not gender neutral

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via Professor, What If…?

What if I could overcome my gut-wrenching hatred for the phrase ‘you guys’?

Well, it would certainly make my life a lot easier because I hear this phrase multiple times a day. I wish I could accept being referred to in terms that insinuate the whole population is male or that male terms are ‘neutral,’ but I can’t. When I hear ‘you guys,’ I don’t feel like whoever is saying/writing this is talking to me because I am not an f***ing guy!

Reminds me of my post on how “guys” was used in an email to advertise a web development job. “Guys” is not gender neutral.

Related posts:

  1. Gender Neutral Bathrooms
  2. Tech people
  3. Gender disparity in web conferences
  4. Web Developers Listserv + Sexism
  5. Oppression by occupation or gender

Written by Eric Stoller

August 24th, 2008 at 1:09 pm

2 Responses to '“Guys” is not gender neutral'

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  1. Just checked out the link to the older post, and couldn’t do much more than shake my head. I like to consider myself moderate in my feminism (although there are news clippings out there somewhere that allude to otherwise, LOL) and while I don’t think there was any intention to disrespect females in that listserve posting, I DO think it’s unfortunate that a “professional” company would get so ‘informal’ that they start assuming gender neutrality in phrases and risk potentially pissing off a nice number of possible applicants. I mean, really, how difficult is it to proofread? Snatch up a thesaurus?

    Seriously… this:

    “Hey guys,

    We’re looking for a motivated web developer who loves what he does. ”

    Moves to this:

    “Hello, everyone! We’re looking for a motivated web developer who loves their job.”

    in less than four words. *eyeroll*

    Erika

    25 Aug 08 at 1:14 am

  2. [...] via the Oregon State University Network Engineering blog: As some of you would know by now, the oregonstate.edu domain is being blocked by hotmail.com. This means that any email coming from our domain will bounce and not be delivered. I just want to give you guys a heads up and let you all know that I am working on getting us delisted from their system. A request has been submitted and I expect to hear back from them in a day or two. [...]

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