The problem is that social activists have discovered computing. Now they are trying to force their world view into the tech domain because they have failed to impart change in the real world.

Hence the faux moral outrage over gendered words.

Hence the hounding of Brendan Eich for his personal views which had no bearing on his technical competency.

Hence the Gnome foundation running out of money because they diverted all their funds to a women's outreach program instead of focusing on software development.

Right now, in the real world, scantily-clad women in bikins are draped across magazine covers, sporting events segregate the sexes, and in many Islamic countries women are treated like slaves... yet somehow “The tech industry may have a problem with women"?

The process has to start somewhere. People in tech like to call themselves egalitarian and progressive, so they should be open to encouraging more people from different backgrounds to enter the pipeline.

i replied to a few threads about this re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions, they are linked to the actual original content by ERE. everything on the site is not original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters, especially when the goal is simply to expand the pool of people that respond positively to your post.

I'm not trolling and I actually hoping for a positive discussion, but when you put those excerpts on a site you made (even if taken from ERE) promoting more women in tech and editorialise them (the ERE sites mentions Masculine and Feminine descriptions, you wrote Average and Better), it does make people feel queasy (affirmative action queasy). If you state the feminine descriptions are 'better', you will be alienating the men, which in many cases are the decision makers on hiring.

If I was in part of the hiring process, and someone told me I had to write in a job description 'We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately.' to attract more women, I think I would be biased against women in my process, both consciously (I don't want 'intimacy' of any kind at a place of business) and probably unconsciously as well.

nobody is telling you you "have" to write things that alienate men, and i guarantee that some of the overly "masculine/average" descriptions repel many men from these positions as well. if you feel you would be biased against women in your hiring process, you should probably remove yourself from said hiring process. if you don't like the ERE descriptions, that's cool, simply write better ones (i don't think ERE is the authority here) - the aim is to be more conscious of the difference language makes.