It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any forbidden words, replacing them with, for now, non-triggering words. Not one person, to my knowledge has even politely questioned publicly whether this was a good use of company funds. If I was a shareholder I'd be outraged.
A small, core group of people loudly make this a huge issue of great importance, while the rest of us just want to get our work done and stay silent so we don't get fired by the woke patrol.
Honestly I can't wait until retirement when I don't have to constantly be walking on eggshells at work. It's sad--I used to love working in tech but it's insufferable now.
That's honestly just poor leadership from scared management. Management should be clearly articulating the mission, goals, and "culture" (for lack of a better word) of the company. This gives management and other employees grounds to challenge well meaning but unnecessary social action by forcing proponents to explain how those social actions would align with / further the goals, mission, and culture of the org. Usually proponents of these woke policies are not capable of doing this.
I don't know if there is a word for it, but I see it as a type of social bikeshedding.
In regular bikeshedding we spend a lot of time arguing over minor factors because everyone feels like they can have meaningful input and contribute. Then we gloss over the complicated stuff because it's too hard to get into.
In this case, people feel like they can push hard on relatively minor issues like uses of words and phrases because they can make a noticeable impact. Precisely because they feel powerless to effect actual systemic change. Widespread protest doesn't seem to change much, but targeted complaints can sometimes get someone fired.
There may be an argument that it could work as a ground-up approach similar to NYC's broken window policing, but I personally doubt that. I think the backlash will be a net negative.
In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia.
Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which was then circulated to a wider set of reviewers.
Once it reached the reviewers, someone with common sense stepped in and asked how many actual women engineers or gender non-binary engineers reviewed it, and did they actually think it represented some type of progress on problematic language.
So they formed a committee of female and gender non-binary coworkers to review it, and their conclusion was that this was harmless language clearly and obviously rooted in decades old technical standards that did not invite or inflame any type of comparison with genitalia or gender choices among people, and that instead of worrying about this kind of exceedingly trivial issue, attention would be better paid to more overt and damaging language problems, like harassment or microbehaviors that disadvantage women in group leadership situations.
On one hand I was very proud of the conclusion they reached, but on the other hand very terrified at the whole process, ranging from extreme reactionary forced changes with no basis in reality all the way to giving a committee of women and gender non-binary coworkers carte blanche to rule on whether or not the language had to be changed (as if the rest of us don’t have brains and can’t voice opinions that ought to carry equal weight about that).
All told it was a colossal waste of time and money that deeply compromised employee trust in company leadership.
> In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia.
This reminds me of people hiding and covering table legs in the Victorian era.
Exactly. Or, say you're building some business logic and you need to make some exceptions for VIP partners. In times past, you would add these exceptions to a "whitelist" and have logic to check this list and apply the exception. Now, you need to be very careful to call this an "allowlist" lest the woke patrol pull you aside and warn you that your variable name is insensitive and non-inclusive. I wish I was joking.
And yet whatever the origin (I suspect nobody can seriously claim to definitely state the actual origin of such a term) its usage as such a list, not referring (necessarily, but indiscriminately so some might be!) to black people, dates back at least as far as the Restoration in 1660 England.
And there's generally no exception for old things. Like many products, ours almost never permits breaking API changes, but an exception was of course made (at significant cost) to strip out public facing fields named "whitelist".
I'm surprised master/slave's the hill you want to die on - it's the one instance where the old terminology really is just bizarre jargon that's being replaced with words that are a direct, common-language description of what they do.
I really don't want to die on this hill! It's an example of a behavior I'd engage in if the wokepatrol wasn't there. I don't even speak English at work, I speak French, and we commonly use the words "maître" and "esclave" in that instance.
Whenever any work-environment friction will arise, I'll stop using those words for sure, I value my job more than I value terminology.
I got into trouble any time I said “guys” as a generic term for “y’all”. Also, I got in trouble for saying ladies or girls or women. I’m honestly not sure how I was supposed to describe a group of women. But no matter what noun I used, a colleague got offended. I quit that job as fast as I could. The company is now defunct, but I’m sure that colleague is still a real pleasure to work with wherever he ended up.
Not the OP but I personally enjoy lewd humour and, at a previous job, would crack jokes at some of my female colleagues. At my current job that would be considered altogether inappropriate, Despite the fact that that I only make those jokes around people I specifically know to be like-minded and give as good as they get, and avoid doing it around (or even within earshot of) people who are not ok with it.
A small, core group of people loudly make this a huge issue of great importance, while the rest of us just want to get our work done and stay silent so we don't get fired by the woke patrol.
Honestly I can't wait until retirement when I don't have to constantly be walking on eggshells at work. It's sad--I used to love working in tech but it's insufferable now.