Berkeley leaders vote unanimously to replace about 40 gender-specific words in the city code with gender-neutral terms — an effort to be more inclusive that's drawing both praise and scorn.
There will be no manholes in Berkeley, California. City workers will drop into"maintenance holes" instead.
That means"manpower" will become"human effort" or"workforce," while masculine and feminine pronouns like"she," ''her," ''he" and"him" will be replaced by"they" and"them," according to the measure approved Tuesday by the City Council. Rigel Robinson, who graduated from UC Berkeley last year and at 23 is the youngest member of the City Council, said it was time to change a municipal code that makes it sound like"men are the only ones that exist in entire industries or that men are the only ones on city government."
Removing gendered terms has been slowly happening for decades in the United States as colleges, companies and organizations implement gender-neutral alternatives. "Anytime you're talking about something where gender is not the issue but you use a gendered term, that immediately sends a message of exclusion, even if it's a dialogue that has nothing to do with gender," said Syrett, who recently spearheaded an update to the guidelines on inclusive language for the Linguistic Society of America."Anything that dismantles inherent bias is a good thing, socially, in the grand scheme of things," the 27-year-old said.
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