[UbuntuWomen] Gender specific pronouns in applications

[Jennie Petoumenou]

Hello again,
I guess the main reason why I joined this mailing list today was to ask a
very specific question:
Has there ever been a discussion about using gender-specific pronouns in
applications?
E.g., if your username is jennie, your online status should read "She is
busy", "ocupada??" in Spanish. If it's John it should be "He is busy".

Personally, I've grown tired of having to use complicated he/she structures
whenever I translate into Greek. Especially when I see what great pains
developers have taken to avoid using complicated singular/plural
structures. These days, dialogs don't say "13 second(s) remaining". They
either say "1 second remaining" or "13 seconds remaining". And if your
language has a different conception of plurality, this is also accommodated
 (for polish,there is a  binary plural for "2 seconds remaining") . So, how
come I cannot have "She is busy" or "She has won the game"?

Like I said, I don't really know if this idea has ever been discussed
before. But I would like to see it being discussed, not just for FOSS, but
for all software. And I would really like to see some concrete proposals
from people with better coding skills than myself.

What I have been envisaging is this: Every time you're asked to create a
username (mostly in messaging applications and games), you would also be
asked "What pronoun would you like to use with this username?" And your
options would be all the grammatically correct options available in your
language. E.g., in German and Greek it would be masculine, feminine,
neutral, in both singular and plural. Thus covering a range of choices,
including nicknames based on inanimate objects or couples having joint
acounts. Moreover, such an approach would alleviate many privacy and
discrimination concerns, as opposed to a question like "Are you male or
female?"
As for the technical side of things, I suppose that the singular/plural
differentiation and localisation infrastructure would provide a good
starting point for this.

Jennie
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