@Margaret63 i Understand why it seems pathetic and I’m not sure how much I care but I also understand why the change and that comes from having studied linguistics and psychology
language embodies sets of beliefs and norms and thus signals how we think about life. In the job arena the use of words that are not gender neutral actually represent a long history of those jobs being associated with a particular gender. You’d like to think the word chairman was gender neutral but it seems it is not. I’ve done training around bias and you can present a series of job titles and ask people to imagine someone in the job and inevitably they are gender driven.
the consequence of that is that bias operates with candidates for those jobs. There has been plenty of research that shows that shortlisting for jobs is very different when it is not possible to identify gender or ethnic origin. Women have a harder time for non traditional roles and those with different racial origins. That’s tough on people who may be more competent than their white male counterparts but miss out
and yet in theory there is legislation that says discrimination shouldn’t exist
what she is doing is trying to find a way to stop that unconscious bias. Whether it will work or not is another matter. One reason it might not work is because people see it as being politically correct as opposed to an attempt to remove discrimination
