![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bad manners
Jul. 5th, 2017 07:35 pmYou, as a manager, ask a transwoman on your team to review a draft survey, which asks respondents "What is your gender?", with the options being Male, Female, or Transgender. She replies to the survey:
How do you respond?
( Read more... )
Read Coraline Ada Ehmke's whole essay about being a woman at Github. My strong suspicion is that a fact-based response like the above would have passed unnoticed from a man, but was considered too aggressive for a woman. There should have been softening language, like "I'm afraid that" and "I know you're working from the best intentions" and "Please don't mind me mentioning one issue".
I've sent a lot of emails like the one above. Good thing I wasn't working for Github at the time.
'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
How do you respond?
( Read more... )
Read Coraline Ada Ehmke's whole essay about being a woman at Github. My strong suspicion is that a fact-based response like the above would have passed unnoticed from a man, but was considered too aggressive for a woman. There should have been softening language, like "I'm afraid that" and "I know you're working from the best intentions" and "Please don't mind me mentioning one issue".
I've sent a lot of emails like the one above. Good thing I wasn't working for Github at the time.
