Not in a pointed way, but as normal conversation “Let’s see, on Tuesday, we’ve got Don and Sue staffing the booth from 8-10, Tom and Mai from 10-noon”, and “Hmmm, Tracy’s estimate for that deliverable is 12 person days, but that doesn’t include Pat’s QA effort”. And I try to avoid “guys” and correct closer colleagues about the term (“Guys, grab your purses and let’s go to lunch!”).įor terms like man months or manning the booth or whatever, I usually come back a sentence or two later using person months or staffing the booth or whatever. More formally, I’ll simply say, “Hi” alone. “Dear Open Web Crusaders,” Log in to Replyįor greetings and salutations at a team level, I use things like, Howdy project-name-fans or -aficionados or -cognoscenti or similar. It takes little effort to modify a practice that hurts others feelings. I choose to care about and respect their feelings enough to avoid hurting them if it’s not necessary. I simply choose to respect the fact that is DOES bother at least one of my coworkers (and so probably bothers others).
So really I don’t have to understand why “guys” bothers some people, and I don’t have to agree with the fact that they have the feelings they do. I’m an old country boy, there is much about people I don’t understand – and I mean no harm.īut, what I DO care about is the feelings of the people I work with (one of whom is Christie). In truth, I don’t really care how people choose to skew what I mean when I use the word guys. Most of the teammates I interact with daily are women. The person in my life I respect the most is my wife. Very few people would describe me as sexist. When I say “guys” (and I’ve done it as Christie described above), I mean “team”, “friends”, etc. While no offense was intended, Jimmy (my room mate) was bothered by it becuase of the racist connotations – so his friends did not use the word to refer to him. I once had a black room mate who objected when someone refered to him as a “big old boy” (both he, and the person that made the statement were from the south and my room mate was over 7 feet tall). It seems to me that MY intent in the use of a word is more important than all the negative connotations that others might attribute to that word. We should focus on promoting language of inclusion, and eliminating that of exclusion. It might sound trivial to you, but language matters. And it was a result of my gaining more knowledge and experience with issues around gender minorities in tech. It was sometime over the last year, if not longer ago. I’m not sure when I started paying attention to this particular construct. If you say it out loud, correct yourself. Start with email, where you have time to re-read and edit. But the best way to get rid of old habits, is to practice new ones.
After several months of concerted, conscious effort, I still slip and say it on occasion. I understand how ingrained the “guys” habit might be for some of you.
#ANOTHER WORD FOR YOU GUYS UPDATE#
(Please comment if you have other alternatives, and I’ll update my post accordingly.)
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