This morning I woke up to a text from a developer friend asking whether, as a copywriter, I thought the slide below was sexist or just crass. You’ll find my answer a little later in this blog post, but it encapsulates a problem that I’ve been trying to put into words for a while now –
A lot* of developers and entrepreneurs etc have a problem with semantics.
* But not all of them. See later in this post.
Every other day, or so it seems, there are new examples of this problem:
In the past year alone I’ve seen laptops, pens and phones with the suffix ‘For Girls’ being savaged on Twitter. And rightly so – unless a creator has decided to intentionally exclude 50% (give or take) of the world’s population from their target audience, everything they make is ‘for girls’.
The language of far too many pieces of software is tied up with that of sexism/misogyny – not too long ago, ‘frape’ (Facebook rape) and ‘whore trains’ (on Myspace) were part of the general public’s lexicon. Actually, scratch that. I have no doubt that plenty of people out there are still using the former.
Was *that* Atlassian slide offensive to women?
Back to whether or not I think the slide in Atlassian’s presentation is offensive. Yes I do, but I also don’t think it was meant to be. In its current form, it implies that ALL girlfriends (and, by extension, all women) are whiny, attention seeking naggers. Now imagine if he’d written the following:
Maven is like my ex-girlfriend
It’s a small change, and you might still hate it, but at least it clarifies that the negative traits exhibited by Maven (in the opinion of the author) are confined to a single unpleasant relationship experience. The ‘like’ makes the whole thing less dehumanising. I’d also argue that it turns it from something sexist to something, at worst, a little crass.
Contrary to what some commentators would have you believe, I don’t think many cases of sexism in tech are down to malice. I think they’re down to thoughtlessness and a lack of sanity checking. Copywriters, the good ones anyway, are analytical people. To the point that we’re often catastrophists; part of our job description is to ask the question ‘is this going to offend anyone?’ If I’d been proofreading this presentation, there’s no chance this slide would have gotten through in its current state.
#notalldevelopers
There’s a very fine line between irreverence and controversy, as more and more heavy-handed startups are discovering when they say something that crosses it. I’m not saying that all developers don’t understand that, nor am I saying that all copywriters do. But the casual association of women with negativity in the slide above, which somehow presumably made it past several different pairs of eyes prior to its exhibition, demonstrates precisely why language and semantics are so important.
You don’t necessarily need to hire a copywriter every time you create a presentation, but it’s unwise to hope that people will give you the benefit of the doubt and explain to everyone that ‘what I’m sure they meant to say was…’
My advice? If you think something might be too edgy, take it out. Or be prepared to face the wrath of Twitter…